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CHARLOTTE BRONTE 

GEORGE ELIOT 

JANE AUSTEN 



CHARLOTTE BRONTE 

GEORGE ELIOT 

JANE AUSTEN 

STUDIES IN THEIR WORKS 



BY y^ 

HENRY H. BONNELL 



LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. 

91 AND 93 FIFTH AVE., NEW YORK 

LONDON AND BOMBAY 

1902 



C^a,^ 



Copyright, igo2 
By Henry H. Bonnell 



All right] restrved 









UNIVERSITY PRESS • JOHN WILSON 
AND SON • CAMBRIDGE, U. S. A. 



4 



^ 



To 
E. C. B. 



CONTENTS 

I. CHARLOTTE BRONTE. page 

(fl) Her Realism 3 

(F) Her Attitude towards Nature 53 

(<:) Her Passion 81 

IL GEORGE ELIOT. 

(fl) Her Religion and Philosophy 131 

(J)) Her Art 199 

(r) Her Sympathy : Further Con- 
sidered 257 

HL JANE AUSTEN. 

(^) Her Place 325 

{b) Her Wonderful Charm . . . 380 



CHARLOTTE BRONTE 

A STUDY OF PASSION 



CHARLOTTE BRONTE 

A STUDY OF PASSION 

A. — HER REALISM 
I 

"There are three principal influences," says the 
biographer of Renan, " which go to shape human 
character : that of heredity, that of locaHty, and that 
of every-day association." And the character maybe 
studied with approximations to truth only after all pos- 
sible evidence relating to such influences is in hand. 
If time be the corrector and adjuster, any approach to 
finality in criticism may be despaired of until the image 
shall have passed into a more or less fixed atmo- 
sphere, — into an atmosphere which has ceased to 
pulsate with the passions and the prejudices, the 
friendships and the hatreds of the present hour. 

As a pathetic illustration of this essential inability 
to seize with a full sense of ownership the finished 
idea of a life whose activities have but just ceased, the 
memorial paper of Mr. Henry James upon Lowell is 
worthy of note. " It is his [the critic's] function," 
says Mr. James, " to speak with assurance when once 
his impression has become final ; and it is in noting 
this circumstance that I perceive how slenderly 
prompted I am to deliver myself on such an occa- 
sion as a critic. It is not that due conviction is ab- 



4 Charlotte Bronte 

sent ; it is only that the function is a cold one. It is 
not that the final impression is dim ; it is only that it 
is made on a softer part of the spirit than the critical 
sense. The process is more mystical, the deposited 
image is insistently personal, the generalizing principle 
is that of loyalty." 

But if the poet had been an offender in the eyes of 
the critic, and if the critic had lived in a less acutely 
fair-minded age than the present ; if instead of having 
the latter-day Mr. James as his friendly reviewer, the 
poet had died far enough back in the century to have 
fallen under the finger of Gifford, this difficulty of 
correct judgment would have been all the more urgent. 
The vast majority of men and women seem to be but 
the net product of ancestry and environment ; and an 
original man used to be regarded with peculiar sus- 
picion as one whose purpose was not explained by his 
environment, and whose lack of ancestry had to be 
accounted for by a kind of spontaneous generation or 
special creation, which, like all biological departures, 
is a little disquieting. Indeed, this nervous attitude 
is even yet a common one. 

We are fond of talking about the Republic of Let- 
ters, and the capitals have a fine rhetorical look on the 
printed page. But too many of those immortals who 
have finally won a free citizenship there would seem 
to have had their fortunes at first cast among the 
numbing rigors of an oligarchy, — their radicalism 
grouped for the while into a forlorn third party, such 
was that questioning challenge of all new modes of 
thought and action which was esteemed to be a 
safeguard of our conservation. 

And yet in course of time the true values come to 
the surface. If there is enough vital excellence in 



Her Realism 5 

a man's work to buoy up what is not vital in it, that 
work will be found afloat in after generations. The 
best books are not the rare books. Every wise writer 
is, sooner or later, a read writer. However slow the 
critics may be in dififerentiating the vitalities from the 
non-vitalities, the life in them is at last discovered, 
somehow as tears are discovered in the presence of 
grief, or a fever in the blood at a tale of wrong. 

It is not so very surprising, then, that the reception 
of * Jane Eyre * in certain critical quarters was a glar- 
ingly mistaken one, and that its appreciation was 
challenged step by step with refusals to accept its 
message because of the misunderstandings of its 
spiritual simplicity. Yet in six months' time the novel 
was in its third edition.^ Sales are not the finest test, 
of course, for ' Queechy,' and ' An Original Belle ' 
are still sold. But it is not only the commonplace 
which is popular: there is another kind of popularity 
which is but the acknowledgment that a great chord 
has been struck true ; and this instinctive recognition 
of a pure, sane genius lasts in an abiding personal 
interest unattached to the other class of "popular" 
writers. How many who read, last year, — well, any 
of the " best-selling books " of that season, can tell 
even the name of its author? On the other hand, who 
does not know that Keats lies buried in Rome; and 
what literary sojourner in the Eternal City does not 
linger for awhile in that old cemetery near the pyramid 
of Gains Cestius? Finally, is there any popular living 

1 ' The Life of Charlotte Bronte,* by Mrs. Gaskell, with an Intro- 
duction and Notes by Clement K. Shorter. New York and London, 
Harper & Bros., 1900, p. 363, note. All references to Mrs. Gaskell 's 
work in this study are made from this, the latest and most authorita- 
tive edition of her biography. 



6 Charlotte Bronte 

writer to whose grave, forty years after his death, will 
flock in one year, as to a shrine, ten thousand pil- 
grims? That was the number which visited the 
Bronte Museum at Haworth in 1895.^ 



II 

There were popular writers in Miss Bronte's day, too, 
who are known now only to students of literature. 
Richardson and Fielding had, each in his own way, 
marked a path for Realism to follow, but it was not 
heeded. The love of the marvellous, formerly fostered 
by the drama, and checked for awhile by Goldsmith, 
and in a minor way by such books as * Evelina ' and 
* Cecilia ' (for artificial as her style was, and highly 
improbable as were some of her incidents. Miss 
Burney's pictures were in general accord with the prin- 
ciples of realism), found full vent again in the * Myste- 
ries of Udolpho,' and in the lucubrations of ' Monk' 
Lewis and 'Anastasius' Hope. While Miss Bronte 
had, in her formative period, only such knowledge of 
literature as the parsonage afforded, and while beyond 
certain standard poets and historians it did not afford 
much ; ^ while her reading was necessarily desultory, 

1 'Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle,' by Clement K. Shorter, 
London : New York, Dodd, Mead & Co., 1896. p. 23. 

2 We know from ' Shirley ' what the Bronte library consisted of in 
part : " mad Methodist magazines, full of miracles and apparitions, and 
preternatural warnings, ominous dreams and frenzied fanaticisms ; " all 
of which came from the maternal forbears in Cornwall. It was not 
until the pleasant relations with her publishers were established that 
she was put in command of a full supply of literature ; and the flood 
that set in then is an index to the previous drouth. In the earlier 
days there was no such assistance, and no time for extended reading 
even if the means had been present. 



Her Realism 7 

as the time for it had to be snatched from household 
drudgery, needlework, and the mistaken art-practis- 
ing, and the nearest circulating library could be 
reached only by a stiff four-mile walk over the moors 
to Keighley (in 1848 we find her complaining that no 
circulating library is accessible), she had doubtless 
dipped into the romance writers enough to appreciate 
their general faults, and to criticise the same in her 
preface to ' The Professor.' 

The story-tellers whose fame was noisiest in Miss 
Bronte's early days might be divided into two classes, 
the ultra-romantic and the tiresomely didactic. An 
encyclopedic list of these would be interesting as 
showing how like a breeze from a new sphere 'Jane 
Eyre' and 'Vanity Fair' scattered their unrealities 
and impossibilities. They are for the most part for- 
gotten, and only by forcibly carrying the attention 
back to them can we rightly understand what the 
originality of Charlotte Bronte and Thackeray meant 
in 1847. 

As good specimens as any of the first class are 
Jane Porter, whose ' Thaddeus of Warsaw ' gained 
such honors (but who reads it now?) ; the Lee sis- 
ters, from one of the ' Canterbury Tales ' of whom 
Byron "borrowed" his 'Werner,' — if, indeed, 'Wer- 
ner ' was written by Byron, and not by the Duchess 
of Devonshire, as the Hon. Frederick Levison-Gower 
now claims ; ^ Mrs. Radcliffe, of lurid memory ; ' Fatal 
Revenge ' Maturin ; the gratefully recalled G. P. R. 
James, with his solitary horseman, his pale moonlight, 
and his lonely inn ; to say nothing of the much-to- 
answer-for Ainsworth, with his Jack Sheppards and 
Dick Turpins. 

^ Nineteenth Century, August, 1899. 



8 Charlotte Bronte 

In the second division repose, among others, Mrs. 
Opie ; Anna Maria Porter, the child friend of Scott; 
Hannah More; Maria Edgeworth, and Miss Landon ; 
and that Mrs. Sherwood who in the working heyday 
of her hfe produced ninety books.^ It is significant 
that the typical didacticists are women. They were 
forced into it, positively, by an honest natural femi- 
nine desire to save fiction, through morality, from utter 
pruriency, and negatively, by a lack of inspiration to 
accomplish the reform along the lines of the highest 
art. It is easy enough for us to laugh at Miss Edge- 
worth's ' Moral Tales ; ' we ought to think a little, in 
her justification, of what she was trying to escape from.^ 

Other novelists still famous in Miss Bronte's day who 
may not be classified so easily were : William Godwin, 
whose writings she did not know, as she asks to see 
them in 1849; ^ Henry Mackenzie, whose voice comes 
down to us a mixed echo of Richardson and Sterne ; 
that sprightly woman, Miss Ferrier; William Carleton 
and Gerald Griffin, two Irish realists before the days of 
realism ; the excellent Miss Mitford ; and the ephem- 

1 Mrs. Sherwood is, curiously enough, omitted from such works as 
the 'Encyclopedia Britannica ' and the 'Library of the World's Best 
Literature.' If such works of reference are intended to chronicle only 
those of the past who live in the present, her name would certainly 
be one of the first to be dropped ; but the author of ' Roxobel ' — still, 
admired by grandmothers and maiden aunts in primitive homes — 
surely deserves mention in any book which professes to be not only a 
recorder of the living dead, but a mausoleum also to the dead dead. 

2 It is just to Miss Edgeworth's memory to say that, but for the 
didactic interference of her father, the popularity of her works would 
have remained ; and that, notwithstanding this interference, such 
novels as ' Castle Rackrent,' ' Belinda,' and ' Patronage,' have a 
fixed place in literary history, and may still be enjoyed by the 
judicious. 

3 Shorter, p. 195. 



Her Realism 9 

eral but fashionable Mrs. Gore.^ I was about to 
put Samuel Warren in the list, but Miss Bronte prob- 
ably read ' Ten Thousand A Year,' as it came from 
Blackwood's, the one strictly literary periodical taken 
in at the parsonage up to 1832, when Frascr' s was 
subscribed to for a short period. 

In none of these had Charlotte Bronte any lot or 
share.^ Surely the remarkable circumstance of her 
criticism of Miss Austen is, not that it differs from 
Sir Walter Scott's (and nearly everybody else's, too), but 
because of its revelation that she had never seen such 
a book as ' Pride and Prejudice,' which had then been 
in print thirty-five years. We are fain to overlook in 
Charlotte Bronte what in others would seem a slight 
upon that delightful recorder of tittle-tattle and charm- 
ing precursor of Trollope. The reader of the biog- 
raphy knows that she was, as a child, uncommonly 

^ Among the " curiosities of literature " which I occasionally take 
down from a dusty top-shelf, I value for the suggestions it invariably 
awakens a certain sadly faded set of twelvemos, in the doubtful bind- 
ing of the early '30's, and bearing the imprint of the Messrs. Harper. 
They are reprints of the most popular of such of the above as had 
fallen from the press by that time ; and the accompanying advertise- 
ment of the publishers, long since turned yellow, mentions these pro- 
ductions as " fashionable," in contradistinction to the " standard " work 
noted on the opposite leaf. Fancy the impossibility of such a distinc- 
tion between fiction and other literature to-day! Yet for the most 
part, the distinction was deserved then. Only since then has the novel 
taken on its more serious side, assuming to itself the characteristics 
of all the other forms of literature also. 

^ She says, in a letter to Mr. Williams : " The plot of 'Jane Eyre ' 
maybe a hackneyed one. Mr. Thackeray remarks that it is familiar 
to him. But having read comparatively few novels, I never chanced 
to meet with it, and I thought it original. . . . The Weekly Chronicle 
seems inclined to identify me with Mrs. Marsh. I never had the 
pleasure of perusing a line of Mrs. Marsh's in my life." — Shorter, 
p. 404. 



lo Charlotte Bronte 

studious, and that her schoolmates were wont to look 
up to her as a prodigy of learning. It is safe to surmise 
that of the books she recommends to Ellen Nussey 
in her letter of July 4, 1834/ she had read a goodly 
number, if not all, herself; and the list is valuable as 
showing that, however high the omissions, there were 
still higher inclusions. But that she was not a trained 
student is evident. Outside of Blackwood' s she had 
but little acquaintance with contemporary writers. 
The favorite heroes of the youthful ' Magazine ' were, 
almost without exception, the famous politicians of the 
day, — were not literary heroes. The natural periods 
or turning-points of literary history were not known 
to her ; and she was therefore without any thorough 
understanding of their reciprocal relations and their 
influence upon subsequent writing. Her reference 
to Mr. Atkinson's book as " the first exposition of 
avowed atheism and materialism " she had ever read,^ 
shows she had no acquaintance with the free thought 
of the preceding century; and if any speculative 
writing had come in her way (which the environment 
forbids us to suppose), it is clear from the tone of her 
letters pertaining to this period that it would have 
been considered unsafe for a young woman's perusal. 
Whether consciously or unconsciously, and without 
necessarily affecting his originality, nearly every writer 
is influenced by some predecessor. Bulwer traces to 
Godwin, Dumas to Scott. The literary father of 
Dickens is Goldsmith, and his uncles are Smollett 
and Sterne ; while Smollett, for his part, is a disciple 
of Lesage, and Sterne is the English Rabelais. Much 
as Thackeray differs from Fielding, if it had not been 

^ Gaskell, p. 134. ^ Gaskell, p. 517. 



Her Realism 1 1 

for Fielding, he would have dififered more. And 
Fielding's prototype, on his own confession, was 
Cervantes. But whence came Charlotte Bronte? 
Stand on the old gray steps of that Haworth par- 
sonage, and cry out the question over the moors 
billowing up from the horizon to your feet. Echo 
will answer "Whence?" 

There never was author of highest rank so uninflu- 
enced by, because there never was one so uncon- 
scious of, literary models. Even the French trash 
she read to perfect her knowledge of that tongue — a 
dangerous experiment with less elemental natures — 
was without any effect upon her modes.-^ Her object 

1 So high an authority as Mrs. Humphry Ward thinks differently. 
[' Jane Eyre.' Haworth edition. New York. Harper & Bros., 1S99. 
Introduction, pp. xxvii-xxx.] There is no more proof, however, that 
the bale of French books whicli Cliarlotte acknowledges receiving 
in 1840 contained Hugo and De Musset (the possibility of which 
Mrs. Ward hints at) than that it contained the merely ephemeral 
writers of the day. Why might it not just as well have held the de- 
lectable fiction of the Countess Dash ? George Sand may have had 
some influence upon her style. But the point here contended for is 
the absolute independence of her jc/m ; and Mrs. Ward admits that 
the differences between the two are fundamental, and that Charlotte 
Bronte's stuj^ is " English, Protestant, law-respecting, conventional 
even." 

She had only a qualified regard for the French woman. She writes 
Lewes, in 1S48, that she never saw any of her works which she ad- 
mired throughout, and thinks that ' Consuelo ' couples " strange 
extravagance with wondrous excellence." [Gaskell, p. 361 ] ' Jane 
Eyre ' and ' Shirley ' were published before she had read " some of 
Balzac's and George Sand's novels," which Lewes " lent her," in 1850, 
" to take with her into the country," and which she returned with the 
criticism that George Sand is often a "fantastic, fanatical, unprac- 
tical enthusiast," "far from truthful " in " many of her views of life," 
apt to be " misled ... by her feelings." " A hopeful point in all her 
writings," she concludes, " is the scarcity of false French sentiment, 
I wish I could say its absence ; but the weed flourishes here and there, 
even in the ' Lettres.' " [Ibid., pp. 494, 495.] 



I 2 Charlotte Bronte 

was to learn a vocabulary, not to form a style ; and 
she did not come in contact with Balzac until late in 
life, when Lewes called her attention that way. When 
we hear of Maupassant apprenticing himself to a ht- 
erary taskmaster for seven years, as Jacob served 
Laban, before putting pen to paper, — the Rachel in 
view, perfection of style ; and when we remember 
that Maupassant is but the perfected flower of a 
plant which had begun to bloom before Miss Bronte's 
day, we exclaim : Here, then, is a mystery ! if not a 
soul breathing rather than a mind working, at least 
a mind drawing its breath of life from the soul, and 
not from other minds. She was one of the queens 
of literature, like Mrs. Browning, and yet not a hte- 
rary woman, like Miss Martineau. 



Ill 

Imagination so existed for this Yorkshire girl. Its 
freedom from literary influence was not only the re- 
sult of the negations of her surroundings, but was an 
indication in part of her determination to carve her 
own way. As we have seen, she knew enough of the 
romancers to deliberately direct her steps in the op- 
posite direction ; and that was realism. Realism to 
her meant simply — as it must mean to all of us when 
we get back to fundamental conceptions — truth to 
nature. By that test she can say, " Read Scott alone ; 
all novels after his are worthless." ^ She wrote that 
before Thackeray had startled the world with a new 
form of realism ; but even after that happy day she 
would still have defended Scott on the ground that 

i Gaskell, p. 135. _ 



Her Realism 1 3 

his romantic situations did not interfere with his sane 
portrayals of character. Though she tells us that, in 
sketching Miss Ainlcy, she is not depicting a figment 
of the imagination [" we seek the originals of such 
portraits in real life only"], she also makes Caroline 
Helstone say, in the same volume, in answer to Shir- 
ley's question who prompted her assertion that cer- 
tain natures, like Cowper's and Rousseau's, were never 
loved : " The voice we hear in solitude told me all I 
know on these subjects." Jane Eyre remarks that the 
three marvellous water-colors which she has shown 
to Rochester she saw " with the spiritual eye." 

The trouble with the latter-day realism is that the 
outside voices are so loud it cannot hear the voices 
of solitude; and the spiritual eye has become dim 
through its constant employment in unspiritual in- 
vestigations. The story of the life of Miss Bronte 
admits us to a wonderful picture of simplicity and 
innocence, — the simplicity rising to spiritual propor- 
tions as the morning light of intellectual aspiration 
blazes through it, and the innocence, like that softer 
light of evening, taking on deeper colors as the 
knowledge comes. Realism was to her a vital con- 
ception ; but we see it exalted by this independence, 
this ideality, this simplicity and innocence. It stood, 
first and foremost, for truthfulness, and her life not 
being full of varied experiences, this truthfulness 
would not allow her to deal imaginatively with situ- 
ations beyond them. But what sets it apart from 
other forms of reality is its sublimation, the actual- 
ities studied filtering through her sweet maidenly 
heart before taking their final shape. How could 
the critics suppose for a moment that ' Jane Eyre ' 
was the work of a man? 



14 Charlotte Bronte 

In the filtration it underwent the change. When 
the bitterness of physical isolation, the sweetness of 
purity of spirit, the faculty of great receptiveness, 
and the habit of dogged obstinacy, born of devout 
conscientiousness, meet in one person, there is likely 
to result a certain hardness, touched and fired by a 
purifying egoism. No competent critic would ever 
apply Chatfield's witty definition of egoism to Miss 
Bronte, — " suffering the private I to be too much in 
the public eye ; " and yet no critic, competent or 
otherwise, could fail to note the intensity of the pre- 
dominant inborn self-emphasis in everything she has 
written. Such subjectivity is simply the product of 
conditions fostered by extreme loneliness of life, 
quickened by intense loftiness of thought. It was 
not the forced atmosphere of voluntary seclusion 
which she breathed, but the clean breeze of native 
loneliness. Hence the natural wildness of the flavor, 
and the purity of the bouquet. " It is moorish," says 
Charlotte, of ' Wuthering Heights,' "and wild and 
knotty as a root of heath. Nor was it natural that 
it should be otherwise, — the author being herself a 
native and nursling of the moors." And this is true 
only in less degree of the sister who wrote it. Picture 
once more the scene : three motherless girls, with 
restless, searching brains hungered for lack of food ; 
with a father whose idyllic selfishness left no room 
in his thoughts for a proper comprehension of their 
difficulties, and a brother whose presence was a tor- 
ment; cut off from the busy world, and with a total 
ignorance of its passwords and divining rods; wear- 
ing out body and soul with fruitless plans to remove 
the load of poverty ; feeling conscious power in their 



Her Realism 15 

veins, and seeing the beckoning hand of fate, but dis- 
cerning not whither it led, and groping in tracts far 
more desolate than any surrounding moors ; the 
silence all about broken only by the tumult of rush- 
ing thought. 

The result is idealized realism, the ideality not 
antagonizing the realism, but clarifying it. The ob- 
jective inilieii, was her physical isolation; the subject- 
tive force was her purity of spirit which penetrated it; 
the result was the glorious landscape of an apocalypse. 
It is unconscious, artless. Indeed, her lonely inde- 
pendence is constantly manifesting itself in artlessness 
of one form or another. That her work has art not- 
withstanding is because genius inevitably is thus at- 
tended : the kindly god provides fairy spades to dig 
withal. Untutored genius involves unlabored art; 
and when the tongue is touched by fire, the form of 
the issuing words is of kindling beauty. 

We have in Charlotte and Emily Bronte the most 
shining of all examples of pure genius. In George 
EHot the genius is alloyed by learning. Gold of the 
purest texture may not be put to as many uses in the 
arts as the alloyed metals, but it is harder to supply 
the purity than the alloy. Because of her narrower 
horizon, Charlotte Bronte had a more compelling 
genius than her successor, whose acquaintance with 
the world's philosophies so overlay her thought that 
the piled up learning was constantly threatening a 
blockade of the tap-root of genius, whence flow the 
living juices which color the whole. The develop- 
ment of spiritual strength depends upon intensity, 
rather than comprehensiveness, of thought ; and in- 
tense thinking, narrowed by surroundings, and driven 
in on itself, must result, if the conditions are other- 



1 6 Charlotte Bronte 

wise favorable, in intense spirituality. Innocence of 
life of the world energizes and drives down to its 
deepest springs the search into the life of self The 
utter absence of world-knowledge becomes the utter 
presence of self-penetration. For we must remember 
that the root idea of genius does not only not involve 
extraordinary culture, but, on the contrary, conveys a 
meaning which such culture may succeed in obliterat- 
ing. So, if Charlotte Bronte could not have drawn 
Tito Melema, George Eliot could not have drawn 
Edward Rochester. If the former could not have 
portrayed with like skill such a subtle analysis of char- 
acter as is presented in Lydgate, — an analysis which 
gets its power from a wide knowledge of motives and 
men, — still more certainly could George Eliot not 
have made the voice of Rochester ring through the 
night, " Jane ! Jane ! Jane ! " to be heard miles and 
miles away by Jane — the wind blowing where it 
listeth, and no one telling whence it cometh or whither 
it goeth. And yet it is truth itself; and Miss Bronte 
once said, " in a low voice, drawing in her breath," 
" But it is a true thing; it really happened." 

I am very far from meaning to compare the genius 
of George Eliot unfavorably with that of one who so 
wholly differed from her. But I do mean that there 
is danger of a loss of the purest spirituality in the 
broadening out of the intellectual sympathies, and, 
conversely, that the intense light of a pure spirituality 
throws a shadow over those sympathies. It is one of 
many indications that Charlotte Bronte did not write 
novels with a purpose ; for with all their nobility, the 
specialized interest of George Eliot's later works bears 
the same relation to Miss Bronte's simple utterance 
as a hymn which is at the same time a prayer does 



Her Realism 17 

to a hymn of praise. George Eliot's genius shone 
through talent, Charlotte Bronte's in spite of talent. 
Each kind has its peculiar dangers, makes its specific 
mistakes. Only, the errors of genius led astray by 
talent are more far-reaching than the accidental lapses 
of genius pure and simple. The character of Lydgate 
is perfectly drawn ; the most searching analysis fails 
to find the slightest flaw in the workmanship. There | 
are many incidental errors, on the other hand, in the 
building up of Rochester. But the book which con- 
tains Lydgate is a failure, so far as it fails to establish 
a doctrine which had taken such an insistent hold 
upon its author as to warp her mind from its proper 
contemplation. The nervous intelligence of genius 
prevented such a failure in ' Jane Eyre.' In that one 
respect, ' Middlemarch ' is a mistake. ' Jane Eyre ' 
merely contains mistake. 

She was aware of her dangers. She acknowledges 
some affinity between 'Jane Eyre ' and ' David Cop- 
perfield,' but exclaims : " Only, what an advantage has 
Dickens in his varied knowledge of men and things ! " ^ 
See what her conception of realism here stood for. 
" Details, situations which I do not understand and 
cannot personally inspect, I would not for the world 
meddle with, lest I should make a more ridiculous 
mess of the matter than Mrs. TroUope did in her 
' Factory Boy.' Besides," she continues, " not one 
feeling on any subject, public or private, will I ever 
affect that I do not really experience. Yet though I 
must limit my sympathies ; though my observation 
cannot penetrate where the very deepest political and 
social truths are to be learnt ; though many doors of 
knowledge which are open for you are forever shut for 

1 Shorter, p. 397. 
2 



I 8 Charlotte Bronte 

me ; though I must guess and calculate and grope my 
way in the dark, and come to uncertain conclusions 
unaided and alone where such writers as Dickens and 
Thackeray, having access to the shrine and image of 
Truth, have only to go into the temple, lift the veil a 
moment, and come out and say what they have seen, 
— yet with every disadvantage, I mean still, in my 
own contracted way, to do my best." ^ 

This lack of experience which she regrets is the 
cause of whatever failures we have to reckon against 
her; for no matter how deliberate a realism, and how 
absolute a conscientiousness, it cannot but transpire 
that a sparse acquaintance with men and women will 
lead the wayfarer into occasional culs-de-sac through 
a failure to appreciate the altered values in the whole- 
ness of a character which the side-lights of motive 
and circumstance thrust into it. It was the passion 
of this woman to study the character in its wholeness ; 
but the absence of the world-knowledge at times ex- 
aggerated, in her pure vision, faults which such a 
knowledge would condone, and minimized virtues 
which it would extol. She saw the world, of neces- 
sity, too much through the eyes of self. And yet the 
failures are unimportant; for, we say again, element- 
ary genius is too intelligent to make fundamental mis- 
takes, while intellectuality forces such mistakes upon 
the intelligence.^ 

1 Shorter, p. 409. 

2 Could we indulge in impossible speculations as to what Currer 
and Ellis Bell would have brought forth had their father's lot been 
cast in a busy city parish, we might easily imagine very different re- 
sults. Take three examples from Mrs. Gaskell as indicating Char- 
lotte's sturdy ignorance of the world, and incidentally emphasizing 
the reflection of the quaint beauty of her isolation upon her thoughts 
and actions. Is there, for example, in all the tearful history of liter- 



Her Realism 



IV 



19 



Not to affect what she did not really experience 
did not mean that she must physically experience 
everything she wrote about, but only that she must 

ary aspirations, a more touching instance of unacquaintance with ways 
and means than the record of the travels of the manuscript of the 
' Professor ' in search of a publisher ? Having experimented with 
house after house, it occurred to this brave struggler, as a last resource, 
to send the, to her precious, but by this time hated, package to Messrs. 
Smith & Elder, a firm which the sophisticated candidate for fame 
would have selected among the first of his choice. And the bundle 
arrives at Cornhill in its original wrapping, with all the other direc- 
tions and cancelled stamps upon it : so each publisher to whom 
it had been submitted must have known perforce of all the other 
publishers who had declined it ! Like her Jane and her Lucy, there 
it stood in all its disadvantages; she would not strip it of a single one. 
Let it be accepted on its inside merits or not at all. 

The second scene is one which stands out in Rembrandt-like colors 
which leave a deep impress for all time upon the heart. When Mr. 
Bronte took his daughters to Brussels, their night in London was 
passed at the famed Chapter Coffee House of Paternoster Row ; and 
thither, " for very ignorance where else to go," drifted the two shrink- 
ing girls when they went up to town to break the news of their iden- 
tity to their publishers. Never before, I conceive, in the history of 
those walls, which had heard the wordy talk of Johnson and echoed 
the laughter of Fielding, had such guests been harbored there; and 
the one female servant of the place — whom I like to fancy a good 
woman — must have taken a motherly interest in the wanderers, whom 
Mr. Smith found " clinging together on the most remote window- 
seat," below which came up to them — not the "mighty roar of 
London," but an occasional "footfall on the pavement ... of that 
unfrequented street." 

Finally, Miss Bronte's constitutional timidity was so intense that 
the meeting of strangers was a positive torment. Whenever it was 
possible, she refused the kind offers of her publishers of introductions 
to the literary lions of the day, even declining Dickens, whose fame 
was then growing daily. Yet this painfully diffident woman nerves 
her almost uncontrollable bashfulness to the point of addressing a 
Frenchman in an English railway carriage, — eager to snatch every 
opportunity to improve herself in his language ! 



20 Charlotte Bronte 

feel mentally the absolute truth of it. Whatever 
faults there are lie in the exaggeration her intense 
fidelity placed upon this conception. Her anxiety 
not to falsify, her determination to paint people as 
she sees them, warts and all, results in a rather slim 
number of agreeable people. Always excepting 
Shirley — for Shirley, be it always remembered, is 
Emily — the only characters in her novels free from 
sorrowful humors of some sort are the Misses Rivers, 
Mrs. Fairfax, and Miss Temple, — all in her first great 
fiction ; which, with the addition of little Henry Symp- 
son from ' Shirley,' and Miss de Bassompierre from 
' Villette ' complete the list. I do not include Caro- 
line Helstone in the category, although she is a 
lovable girl, because she is in part an idealized por- 
trait of Charlotte Bronte herself, — she coyly placing 
herself in a romantic atmosphere for once (as if she 
could not bear to part from Emily after having placed 
her there first), and attempting to hide from discovery 
in such an unusual course by speaking in the third 
person. 

The rigor of her portrayals, we cannot but feel, is 
occasionally overdone. Her portrait of Madame Beck, 
for example, is too severe, although we know the 
provocations. It is difficult to believe that " not 
the agony in Gethsemane, not the death on Calvary, 
could have wrung from her eyes one tear." Lucy 
had, at least, considerable freedom there, and was 
apparently allowed to go out evenings, even to the 
theatre, with Dr. John, when she so desired. She 
just mentions some of Madame Beck's good points, 
showing, in spite of her antipathy, and except for its 
Jesuitry, that the school was a rationally managed one, 
and that if the pupils were not happy, it was not 



Her Realism 2i 

wholly Madame Beck's fault. Because Miss Bronte 
believed all men and women to be imperfect, her 
characters reflect this belief, — sometimes to an un- 
pleasant degree of truthfulness. Even Robert Moore, 
fine fellow as he is, is made to sacrifice to Baal by- 
turning his back on Caroline, and seeking matrimonial 
alliance with a pecuniary end in view. And on the 
night of Robert's confession of his meanness, the 
sturdy Yorke himself tells a " dark truth," namely, 
that if his old sweetheart had loved him as he once 
fancied he loved her; if he " had been secure of her 
affection, certain of her constancy, been irritated by 
no doubts, stung by no humiliations . . . the odds 
were (he let his hand fall heavy on the saddle) that 
he should have left her ! " No marvel that after this, 
" they rode side by side in silence." Miss Bronte 
does not express any scorn of men, as apart from 
women, here, but holds the glass to human nature. 
For she who drew Edward Crimsworth and Brockle- 
hurst also painted Jane Eyre's aunt and Madame 
Beck, — to say nothing of Mrs. Yorke, into whose 
mouth she puts the spitfire of the Quarterly s very 
words, thus showing herself capable of bright revenge. 

But, though we feel the austerity of her treatment, 
though we see that the arrow aimed at exactness 
may fall below the heart of the centre because not 
directed above it, though the truth which she finds 
is at times a little too harsh for common vision, still 
— such is her general truthfulness — her impersona- 
tions do not cease to interest because ' disagreeable ; ' 
nay, none of her strongest characters are among the 
exceptions. 

And the severity is always keen against herself. 
Her portraits of the Professor, Jane Eyre, and Lucy 



2 2 Charlotte Bronte 

Snowe intend to urge the next to impossible like- 
lihood of their originals to win that affection for 
which they were perishing because of the natural 
obstacles their dispositions offered to popular esteem. 
Who does not remember how their author is con- 
stantly checking and subduing their dreams of happi- 
ness? Such dreams are madness, she says again and 
again ; and she makes her heroines plain and unpre- 
possessing and prim and outwardly cold, in order to 
make the chances of happiness fantastic. She was 
aiming, as we know from the preface to the ' Pro- 
fessor,' against the fallacious romanticism of the day, 

— the " passionate preference for the wild, wonder- 
ful, and thrilling." " I said to myself that my hero 
should work his way through life as I had seen real 
living men work theirs ; that he should not get a 
shilling he had not earned; that no sudden turn 
should lift him in a moment to wealth and high sta- 
tion ; that whatever small competency he might gain 
should be won by the sweat of his brow ; . . . that 
he should not even marry a beautiful girl or a lady 
of rank. As Adam's son he should share Adam's 
doom, and drain throughout life a mixed and mode- 
rate cup of enjoyment." 

And so she places Jane and Lucy in adverse cir- 
cumstances such as she was personally acquainted 
with, that they may look the hardest facts of life full 
in the face. When Lucy — in whom there is even 
more of Charlotte Bronte than in Jane — is, in her 
incomparable way, endeavoring to propitiate the 
future by realizing the present, she soliloquizes : 

Is there nothing more for me in life — no true home 

— nothing to be dearer to me than myself, and by its par- 



Her Realism 23 

amount preciousness to draw from me better things than I 
care to cultivate for myself only? Nothing at whose feet I 
can willingly lay down the whole burden of human egotism, 
and gloriously take up the nobler charge of laboring and 
living for others ? I suppose, Lucy Snowe, the rule of your 
life is not to be so rounded ; for you the crescent phase 
must suffice. Very good ! I see a huge mass of my fellow- 
creatures in no better circumstances. I see that a great 
many men, and more women, hold their span of life in con- 
ditions of denial and privation. I find no reason why I 
should be of the few favored. I believe in some blending 
of hope and sunshine sweetening the worse lots. I believe 
that this life is not all ; neither the beginning nor the end. 
I believe while I tremble ; I trust while I weep. ... It is 
right to look our life accounts bravely in the face now and 
then, and settle them earnestly. And he is a poor self- 
swindler who lies to himself while he reckons the items, 
and sets down under the head " happiness" that which is 
misery. Call anguish anguish, and despair despair ; write 
both down in strong characters with a resolute pen ; you 
will the better pay your debt to Doom. Falsify; insert 
"privilege" where you should have written "pain," and 
see if your mighty creditor will allow the fraud to pass, or 
accept the coin with which you would cheat him. Offer 
to the strongest, if the darkest, angel of God's host water 
when he has asked blood — will he take it? Not a whole 
pale sea for one red drop. 

That she carries it too far in her supreme eiifort is 
evidenced by the ending of * Villette.' Her father, 
generally wrong, was right in insisting upon a happy 
conclusion there. The matter of endings is always 
to be determined by the logical drift of the plot. If 
without an insult to rational intelligence Jack may 
have Jill, we poor mortals who love a lover want it 



24 Charlotte Bronte 

brought about; but if it can be done only by a gym- 
nastic performance, we would prefer a little heart- 
ache and great spiritual satisfaction to a reconciled 
father, a made-up quarrel, and a happy marriage, — 
all accompanied by strong mental depression. But 
surely, Paul Emmanuel's ship might have come back, 
and the " pain-pressed pilgrim " ended her days in 
certain joy, without any shock to the trained percep- 
tions. I suspect she had been led, somewhat against 
her conscience, to make ' Jane Eyre ' and ' Shirley ' 
close happily; and in her final work, into which the 
whole strong essence of her suffering was infused, she 
was determined not to be swayed from her fell tragic 
purpose. She, who is usually so logical, is forced 
by this Spartan fixedness not to be led into paths 
of dalliance to an illogical, and therefore inartistic, 
conclusion. 

Her feelings were kept under the surveillance of 
distrust, owing to her nervous shrinking from outward 
display. So, while there is a consequent inward ex- 
pansion, the published result is often a lack of warmth 
in the portrayal of character. It was as if she 
dreaded to praise too eagerly through fear of a rejec- 
tion of the gift from such an insignificant giver: the 
fancied repulse overcame the actual impulse. For 
example : — 

I liked her. It is not a declaration I have often made 
concerning my acquaintance in the course of this book. 
The reader will bear with it for once. Intimate intercourse, 
close inspection, disclosed in Paulina only what was deli- 
cate, intelligent, and sincere, therefore my regard for her 
lay deep. An admiration more superficial might have been 
more demonstrative. Mine, however, was quiet. 



Her Realism ' 25 

Because of this her minor characters are forgotten, 
except by her close students, and only her great 
creations, like Rochester and Emmanuel, are remem- 
bered, because with them only does the passion burn 
through the timidity. 

One feels a primness, a restriction ; but it is not 
owing, as has been supposed, to an old-maidenish 
prudery, but to a young-maidenish modesty, — the 
modesty of a maid of her time, which is different 
from that of the present day ; and which was exag- 
gerated even for her time by the seclusion of her sur- 
roundings. But — such are the happy recompenses 
of genius — nearly every negation in such an order 
of mind stands for the corresponding acquisition. 
The primness results in a fine logical exactness, and 
fulfils one of the minor definitions of genius, — " infi- 
nite painstaking." 

It is her logic, in general, that makes her delinea- 
tions so sharp, — her logic leagued with her stout 
conscientiousness. Nearly every other author would 
have softened the picture of the death-bed of Mrs. 
Reed. Not she. It is a splendid, if terrible, picture 
of death-bed remorse, without any death-bed repent- 
ance, — the pain of a guilty conscience without the 
change of the spiritual attitude towards her sin which 
is signified in the more effective word, and without 
which the remorse is futile and cowardly. The author 
pities her, and makes Jane forgive her. Miss Bronte's 
attitude is eminently Christian ; but her clear-eyed 
genius penetrates the mists of sentimentality raised 
by those who conjure up final events in accordance 
with pious hopes as against assured certainties, and 
perceives that " it was too late for her to make now the 
effort to change her habitual frame of mind : living, 



26 Charlotte Bronte 

she had ever hated me — dying, she must hate me 
still." Inexorable, you say. Yes, but bravely true ; 
and though to be contemplated with tears, yet full of 
a stronger morality than that of the eleventh-hour 
repentance of average fiction. As she sowed, she 
reaped. It is stern, just, perfect. But it required 
courage to set it forth ; and it is perhaps the finest 
evidence in Miss Bronte's work of her logical mind 
and conscientious spirit, — two characteristics, I 
believe, more pre-eminently twined in her than in any 
other author. To such a marriage must we trace her 
" severity," — a legitimate child of honest parents. 

V 

One might ask, if she did not affect what she did 
not really experience, how she came to make those 
social blunders in ' Jane Eyre ' which gave the re- 
viewers such a turn. Miss Bronte doubtless thought 
she had found the experience in the homes in which 
she had led the life of a dependant ; and Miss Ingram 
was doubtless intended to reflect some supercilious 
miss who had crossed the path of the little governess, 
wincing at the contrast between careless freedom and 
careworn slavery, — between proud looks and a high 
stomach and their utter physical and psychical oppo- 
sites. It is quite possible she exaggerated the contrast, 
her natural retiring shyness magnifying what seemed 
to her the reverse of shy into something bolder than 
it really was. It is simply one of the faults of inten- 
sity unchecked by experience, — one of the marks of a 
lack of technical training. It does not interfere with 
her general veracity. Even in such details as per- 
tained to the fashionable life she was ignorant of, the 



Her Realism 27 

falsity is only in the details. The character of Miss 
Ingram is clearly enough seen through all the faults 
of manner in telling it. 

Veracity was more than a study with Miss Bronte; 
it was a passion. The emphasis laid upon it at times 
had its outcome in an exaggeration which defeated 
the very purpose of its aim, making the situation un- 
likely where it was only meant to be intense. It is 
hard to believe, for example, that the silence following 
the interruption of the marriage ceremony of Jane 
Eyre and Rochester lasted for ten minutes. A ten- 
minutes silence at such a time is a sizable slice. Of 
the same sort is her description of Graham conferring 
with Lucy about his impending interview with Mr. 
Home. His fate hung on the outcome of that inter- 
view; and yet so anxious is the author to keep before 
the reader the idea of the gay, debonair Graham, — the 
picture set forth at the beginning of the story [" a 
handsome, faithless-looking youth . . . his smile fre- 
quent, and destitute neither of fascination nor of 
subtlety "], — that, although she makes his hand trem- 
ble and a " vital suspense alternately hold and hurry 
his breath," she can calmly assure us that in all this 
trouble " his smile never faded." It is also a tax 
upon our credulity to accept the cool statement that 
the knowledge possessed by Helstone and Moore that 
they stood a good chance of being shot from behind 
a wall, that drizzling night they went on their danger- 
ous errand to Stillbro' Moor, made them " elate." I 
am convinced that Richard Coeur de Lion himself 
would hardly be elated with the idea of being shot in 
the dark. But her notion was to lay emphasis on the 
fact of their " steely nerves and steady-beating hearts." 
It is merely another example of over-emphasis, almost 



2 8 Charlotte Bronte 

her only fault in character drawing, and a natural 
fault of writers who feel their convictions intensely, 
and whose faithful realism is harassed by ideality. 

Not to multiply instances, let us say, in conclusion, 
that delirious persons do not talk just like Caroline 
Helstone in her wanderings. What causes some of 
Miss Bronte's conversations to seem unreal is her 
making her characters say to, what other novelists 
would make them say of, each other. This is also the 
fruit of the unusual conditions of her life. She thought, 
as it were, out loud, as is the habit of persons much 
accustomed to solitariness. 

There is a lack of skill, too, in the management of 
the plot, and for the same reasons. For, given sim- 
plicity, innocence, love of truth, as the basic character, 
and intensity as the temperament, and such mechani- 
cal complexities as the arrangement and joining to- 
gether of all the parts (which requires a technical 
gift quite different from that of the pure conceiving 
of character) will only bewilder and confuse. It is 
extremely improbable that the presence of the mani- 
acal wife in Thornfield could have been concealed 
from Mrs. Fairfax and the servants, and that their 
suspicions should not have been conveyed to Jane. 
There is no need for the elaborate portraiture of the 
king and queen of Belgium in ' Villette.' They have 
nothing to do with the story, and are of no interest in 
themselves : with such matter crowded into it, the 
book ceases to be a story, and becomes a journal. 
And all that intense picturing of Miss Marchmont's 
sufferings, at the beginning of the same book, might 
have been omitted. 

It was a too careful notice of such seeming care- 
lessness that moved the criticisms of those reviewers 



Her Realism 29 

who made such a stir in their day, but who are now 
forgotten, while the object of their attack Hves on. 
They were honest enough, though mistaken and not 
far-seeing. They could not penetrate the veil of the 
mystery ; nor could they know what we know of the 
personal life and aspirations of one who was to them 
simply a new novelist to earn some daily bread over ; 
whose name and whose sex was a riddle, and who 
used a language not before heard, and therefore open 
to conservative opposition. The famous Quarterly 
Review article ^ would have been ?«famous only on 

1 The subsequent history of this article is one of the most curious 
instances in literary records of mistaken application. Its supposed 
author was Lockhart, and Miss Bronte's defenders have made it hot 
for his memory. For over forty years he was held up to public 
beating, — Mr. Swinburne [' A Note on Charlotte Bronte.' London : 
Chatto & Windus, 1877] and Mr. Birrell [' Charlotte Bronte.' 
London: Walter Scott, 1877] laying on particularly heavy strokes as 
they passed by. Yet they were not certain of the authorship ; and, 
of course, it did not cross their minds that the writer might have been 
a woman. " Who wrote the article," says Mr. Birrell, " is not publicly 
known" [p. 108]. And yet thirty-eight years before that, Charlotte 
and her publishers knew that Miss Rigby (afterwards Lady Eastlake) 
was the author [Shorter, p. 347] ; and the Memoirs of Sara Coleridge 
containing a letter to Quillinan referring to Miss Rigby in this con- 
nection were published several years before Mr. Swinburne and 
Mr. Birrell wrote their monographs. The article was certainly in 
Lockhart's style, and in keeping with the traditions of the Quarterly. 
Charlotte said, before she was informed of the authorship, that the 
writer was " no gentleman " [Shorter, p. 190J. What Miss Rigby felt 
when she read Swinburne, Birrell, and others may be surmised, for 
I believe she must have repented of her wounding judgments. And 
it is still open to suspicion that Lockhart tinctured the article with 
his venom. 

There were other reviews that hurt also, one of which was our own 
North Americati of October, 1848, which may be here alluded to as 
an instance of cocksureness now, happily, not so prominent as in the 
past. The heading of the notice ran thus : 

" I. Jane Eyre, an Autobiography. Edited by Currer Bell. Boston: 
Wilkins, Carter & Co., 1848. i2mo. 



30 Charlotte Bronte 

the supposition that the writer was personally ac- 
quainted with the novelist. As it stood, it was merely 
brutal through ignorance and spiritual dullsighted- 
ness. Miss Bronte's description of the house party 
at Thornfield is a failure, of course. She had no real 
leaning towards that kind of writing, and not enough 
experience to do it well; nor had she the gift of 
many lesser writers to absorb into their descriptions 
the essential masterly qualities of the descriptions 
of others. The main point overlooked by her critics 
was, and is, to see through this crudeness to the vital- 
ities beyond. The critics took roughness for coarse- 
ness. She drew coarse characters, but they were 
not coarsely drawn. We see the picture, and we say 

2. Wuthering Heights. By the author of Jane Eyre. New York : 
Harper & Bros., 184S. 2 vols., i2mo. 

3. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, by Acton Bell, author of Wuther- 
ing Heights. New York: Harper & Bros., 1848. 2 vols., i2mo." 

That is, Acton Bell, or Anne Bronte, wrote all three! The writer 
says, however, that 'Jane Eyre,' bears the mark of more than one 
mind and one sex. The descriptions of dress, " the minutiae of the 
sick chamber," and the " various superficial refinements of feeling in 
regard to the external relations of the sex" are feminine; but the 
" clear, distinct, decisive style of its representation of character, 
manners, and scenery . . . continually suggests a male mind." It is 
taken for granted that Acton is a man, and is the portrayer of that 
portion of ' Jane Eyre ' which has to do with Rochester. " We are 
gallant enough to detect the hand of a gentleman in the composition." 
It is more difficult for us to discover the hand of a gentleman in the 
review, or to deduce from its tone what constituted the reviewer's 
right to pass judgment upon what gentlemen do. And certain kinds 
of gallantry are the worst kinds of insult. 

Quarterly reviewers have had their little day. That evil trinity, Gif- 
ford, Lockhart, and Croker, are overthrown Olympians, and the insis- 
tent fairness of our age prohibits any succession to the ofiice. They 
were only fit to crush Delia Cruscans and the like ; and their pro- 
nouncements were not based upon what a later generation demands 
in the way of judgment. Think of the critical ability of a man who 
could deliberately put Charlotte Bronte, as a poet, before Emily ! 



Her Realism 



31 



it is coarse ; but that is because the coarse object is 
deHneated with truth. One looking for coarseness 
must go elsewhere.^ 

^ Lewes' article in the Edinburgh Review, Jan., 1850, while striving 
to do her justice, was quite unpardonable in its flippancy, and was 
far worse, considering the fuller knowledge he possessed of the real 
facts of her life, than the Quarterly^ s ; and her letter to him was a 
deserved rebuke. [Gaskell, p. 449.] Lewes was an acute, not a pro- 
found man. The only critic of her work during her life who really 
understood her, and the first to understand Emily (too late, alas I for 
her earthly satisfaction), was Sydney Dobell, in the Palladium (bound 
volume of 1850). His correspondence with Miss Bronte should be 
read by every student of her life. See ' Life and Letters of Sydney 
Dobell,' London, Smith, Elder, & Co., 1878. The Palladium article is 
reprinted in the first volume. 

It is interesting to note, in this connection, that if the identity of 
the Bronte sisters was not known to certain persons in London before 
the question " Who is Currer Bell.'" passed from lip to lip over 
England, it argues for much lack of penetration. Charlotte began 
her correspondence with the firm of Aylott & Jones concerning the 
production of the Poems by the Bells as early as January, 1846. She 
wrote from Haworth, and under her own name, as sponsor for Currer 
Bell. It is very remarkable that this firm contributed nothing to the 
elucidation of the problem which sprang up upon the publication of 
'Jane Eyre,' for they knew at least that Currer Bell was the friend 
of Charlotte Bronte, and that Charlotte Bronte's home was Haworth. 
The identity of the initials must also have seemed suspicious. If they 
knew and kept silence, it is one of the most notable silences on 
record. Messrs. Smith and Elder must also have had their unpub- 
lished suspicions, for the same reason. 

One of the most significant indications of the entire change of view 
we have undergone in our social attitude towards women may be 
found in Southey's well-known letter to Miss Bronte. It is quite 
possible that some old-fashioned gentlemen may still applaud the 
advice, but the point is that if Southey had to deal with the subject 
now, he would write differently : it is not now the view of literary 
men. What gave our author special offence in the criticisms of her 
work was the folly and crime of blaming her for writing, as a woman, 
what would have been condoned in a man. She was one of the first 
to stand for the sexlessness of art. She asked for praise or condem- 
nation for the work's sake, not because she, a woman, did it; and her 
struggle had a good deal to do with the final literary emancipation of 
womanhood. " Literature cannot be the business of a woman's life, 



32 Charlotte Bronte 



VI 

Her artlessness is shown on many sides. For exam- 
ple, it is everywhere evident in her faihng to screen 
the locality of her story. All the places mentioned 
in the books are places known on the maps. Whin- 
bury is Oxenhope. Nunnely is Oakworth. Morton 
is Hathersage. " Field Head " is Oakwell Hall near 
Birstall, and all the other ' Shirley ' scenery is equally 
patent. The Haworth edition of the novels is sprinkled 
with photographs of the originals of the localities 
she describes under other names. She has not only 
been to the Brussels she writes of (unlike Mrs. 
Radcliffe, whose vivid mise en schie'is wholly fanciful), 
but one may visit the city, with copies of ' Villette ' and 
the ' Professor,' in hand and discover the places therein 
made famous, — the Rue d' Isabelle, the Protestant 
cemetery, the church where the confession was made, 
the park to which Lucy stole at midnight on the 
feast of the Martyrs. And because the original of 

and it ought not to be," wrote Southey, on the ground that the seek- 
ing in imagination for excitement would be rendered unnecessary by 
the vicissitudes and anxieties of that other life which, as a woman, she 
must accept. Of course, he could not foresee the after-fame of this 
timid seeker for help ; and he would even in his own day have 
acknowledged, I think, that in cases of real genius, there is no volun- 
tary, arbitrary "seeking" in imagination, but that the imagination 
exists involuntarily, a hungry call on nature, demanding vent. Had 
Charlotte Bronte been less of a genius, this letter of Southey might 
have done her harm. It is a pity that he did not live, as Wordsworth 
did, to know the matured woman to whom, as a girl, he gave his 
asked-for advice. And it should be remembered that it was a 
specimen of Charlotte's verse that he saw: his answer was appro- 
priate enough for that special exhibition. But it is his generalizing 
that we of a later day have corrected. 



Her Realism 



33 



Brocklehurst was immediately detected, Brocklebridge 
church was seen to be no other than Tunstall's, over 
which that pious gentleman presided. Finally, as all 
the world knows, Lowood is no fiction, but another 
name for the all too real Cowan's Bridge. 

Edward Crimsworth curses his brother as a " grease- 
horn," — a term which is explained to be "purely 

shire ; " as if the dash would not spell York to 

all who knew the district. On the other hand, it is 
only by roundabout methods that one may dis- 
cover that St. Oggs is Gainsborough. Indeed, 
George Eliot departs from geographical veracity 
by giving the Floss (/. e., the Trent) a tributary, as 
if to throw a too eager searcher after originals off the 
track.^ 

It is the same with the characters : they are simply 
the occupiers of the places, all personally or tradition- 
ally known to the author. The name of Eyre was not 
invented. Dr. John stood for Mr. George Smith, and 
his mother was the prototype of Mrs. Bretton. Cyril 
Hall's original was Canon Heald. The curates im- 
mediately recognized themselves, much to Miss 
Bronte's dismay, and made a joke of the matter, — 
which showed them to be as bad as they were 
painted. Mr. Nicholls was let off easily in the pass- 
ing reference to Mr. Macarthy. As Morton is recog- 
nized as Hathersage, it is fair to assume that St. John 
Rivers is the fictional name of Henry Nussey, who 

1 Those wishing to identify scenery in George Eliot should consult, 
among other papers, Mr. George Morley's article in the Gentleman's 
Alagazine for December, 1890 (reprinted with illustrations in the 1897 
volume of the Art Journal) ; ' George Eliot's Country/ in the Century 
for July, 18S5; also articles \x\.Mu}iseys, Aug., 1897, and tht Bookman, 
vol. ii., p. 376. 

3 



34 Charlotte Bronte 

was vicar there, especially as the characters fit. We 
have seen that her discoverer has acknowledged that 
Miss Ainley was drawn from life. The other old 
maid in the story was also known, and afterwards 
married. Mr. Cartwright's works at Liversedge were 
attacked, as were Robert Moore's at Hollovv's-mill. 
Everybody knows who Paul Emmanuel was in real 
life. It is evident that the Vashti she describes in 
' ViUette ' was the Rachel she saw in London. There 
was " absolute resemblance " in Hortense Moore to 
Mile. Hausse; and the originals of the other teachers 
in ' Villette ' are mentioned in the letters from Brussels. 
A Miss Miller sat for the portrait labelled Ginevra Fan- 
shawe. Miss Nussey says ^ Charlotte had met the 
original of Helstone, although she blended his char- 
acteristics with those of her father. Mr. Brocklehurst, 
if you will pardon me for mentioning it again, is the 
Rev. Cams Wilson. Miss Nussey herself is commemo- 
rated in Caroline Helstone. Miss Wooler's memory 
is preserved in the picture of Miss Temple, and Miss 
Scratcherd was equally well known in the flesh. 
Helen Burns was Maria Bronte. The demoniacal 
wife in 'Jane Eyre' was not an invention, nor, as we 
have seen, was that voice in the night. Mme. Beck 
and her previous study in the ' Professor ' were recog- 
nized at once. Compare the reference to the time 
wasted in art-practising — 

I have in my day wasted a certain quantity of Bristol 
board and drawing paper, crayons and cakes of color, but 
when I examine the contents of my portfolio now, it seems 
as if during the years it had been lying closed some fairy 
had changed what I once thought sterling coin into dry 

1 Scribner's, May, 187 1. 



Her Realism 35 

leaves, and I feel much inclined to consign the whole col- 
lection of drawings to the fire ; I see they have no value. 

with what Lucy Snowe says of the same thing : 

I sat bending over my desk drawing — that is, copying — 
an elaborate line engraving, tediously working up my copy 
to the finish of the original, for that was my practical notion 
of art ; and strange to say, I took extreme pleasure in the 
labor, and could even produce curiously finical Chinese 
fac-similes of steel or mezzotint plates — things about as 
valuable as so many achievements in worsted-work, but I 
thought pretty well of them in those days. 

Because Lucy Snowe is Charlotte Bronte, as is Jane 
Eyre, and as is the Professor. " Mrs. Pryor was well 
known to many, who loved the original dearly." The 
very animals of the novels were the pets of the par- 
sonage. This faithfulness of reproduction extends in 
one case to the name of the character, her most typical 
Yorkshireman being Mr. Yorke himself; for, says Mrs. 
Gaskell of the original, " No other country but York- 
shire could have produced such a man." ^ Mary 
Taylor recognized the Yorke group away off in New 
Zealand where she read the novel, and acknowledged 
its truthfulness. There is, indeed, a veritable triumph 
for Miss Bronte's art in Miss Taylor's statement that 
she and the others were made to talk very much as 
they would have talked if they had talked at all.^ 
That shows both the faithfulness of her realism and 
her logical power in building an imaginative structure 
upon a well-ascertained base. The realism was not 
mere phonography. The conversations were created 
to suit the known characters. Imagination had full 
sway; but, recklessly unmodifiable to every recog- 

1 Gaskell, p. 158. 2 Shorter, p. 251. 



36 Charlotte Bronte 

nized norm as the talk of the Yorke children seems, it 
is welcomed by the most intelligent of them as finely 
true.^ 

No such list as this can be made of any other writer, 
and it is of the highest interest as illustrating the 
veracity of Miss Bronte's method. She describes what 
she knows. She had not had much acquaintance with 
sea scenery, so there is hardly any mention of the sea 
in her books. In making Hortense Moore foreign in 
dress, she makes the foreignness Belgian. 



VII 

Her range of vision being narrow, and her truthful- 
ness not permitting her to extend it beyond the limits 
of experience, we find not only known characters, but 
a similarity of type and situation. There are not many 
men of many minds in her novels. Hunsden's pecu- 
liarities are an early study of Yorke's. Dr. John 
talks to Lucy somewhat as Rochester talks to Jane. 
There is a recurrence of the master-and-pupil situa- 
tion of the ' Professor ' in ' Shirley ' and ' Villette.' 
Paul Emmanuel is a moral Rochester, in a Roman 
Catholic environment. Jane Eyre and Lucy Snowe 
are twin sisters,,; — which, knowing as we do their one 
original, is a dazzling evidence of their beautiful truth. 
Even in the incidental situations of the stories is this 
similarity to be found. Louis Moore's trifling with 
Shirley's desk is a counterpart of Paul Emmanuel's 
with Lucy's. Indeed, this fondness for meddling with 
other persons' affairs is quite an alarming symptom in 
her heroes. 

^ Regarding Emily's work, one walking from Keighley to Haworth 
may see the name Earnshaw on a sign before an inn. 



Her Realism 37 

And that the artistic imagination did not run away 
with the verisimiHtude which she made a matter of 
course, is sufiEiciently proved by the outcome of the 
Lowood controversy. To revert to George EHot once 
more, — the comparison is inevitable, — if the latter 
writer had had to speak of a past experience at a 
school which, but for some care, would have been 
immediately recognized as Cowan's Bridge, she would 
have so cloaked the identity that such a recognition 
would have been impossible, or would have cleverly 
intimated that the story was of the long ago and that 
the abuses had for a century or so been eradicated. 
Charlotte Bronte erred in these fine distinctions, be- 
cause of an absorption in her theme which allowed no 
time for other than setting it forth downright. She 
maintained that every word of the Lowood matter 
was in accordance with fact, and Mrs, Gaskell sub- 
stantiated it from personal investigation.^ It is not 
surprising that there was a hubbub about it. But 
Charlotte did not expect its original would be dis- 
covered. She was not a reformer, like Dickens. 
* Jane Eyre ' was not a novel with a purpose. Lo- 
wood was not intended as a companion picture to 
Dotheboys Hall. Dickens thundered against evils 
which he believed to be present. There were no 
evils at Cowan's Bridge when Charlotte Bronte wrote, 
for the school had been removed to Casterton, and 
its objectionable features were a thing of the past.^ 
Indeed, she tells us as much in the story. Its bitter- 
ness had so pierced her memory, however, that her 
on-rushing thought did not take the prudent steps 

1 Gaskell, pp. 65 seq. 

2 See her letter to Miss Wooler, Shorter, p. 262. 



38 Charlotte Bronte 

which a more deliberative judgment would have 
dictated.^ 

And I take it that this delineation of known per- 
sons and places is a very different thing from the 
" local color " of the more modern novelists. With 
them it is the celebration of the district, the town, 
the street. Miss Bronte had no such artistic pho- 
tography in mind. Her scenery was not intended to 
be recognized ; she fancied she had concealed it be- 
hind fictitious names. She had an inherent terror of 
publicity, and wished the identity between Currer 
Bell and Charlotte Bronte to remain unknown. The 
things she had experienced came to her as the natural 
things to be described ; and in the bright innocence 
of her heart, and the quaint self-deception of her se- 
clusion, she wove her magic web around the people 

1 Local tradition, according to Mr. Candy \GentlemarCs Magazine, 
vol.267, p. 415: Some Reminiscences of the author of ' Jane Eyre '] 
supports Charlotte's statement that "some died at the school and 
were buried quietly and quickly," notwithstanding Mrs. Gaskell's 
statement to the contrary. " In Leek churchyard, a short distance 
from Cowan's Bridge, are two gravestones, the inscriptions on which 
record the deaths of pupils at the school (one of the names is Becker) 
at the time of the epidemic described in the novel. If the date of the 
year — which is somewhat illegible from age — is correctly deciphered, 
the pathetic record in ' Jane Eyre ' is literally true." This writer also 
vouches, from personal investigation, for the general unsanitary situa- 
tion of the place, and the unsuitability of the building for the purpose 
to which it was put. In this connection, it should be insisted that she 
is, distinctly, not a " governess novelist." Anne might fairly be called 
that, but not Charlotte. She did not have the idea before her of 
righting any particular wrongs; the absolute freedom of her genius 
saved her from that. Her direct progression towards truth, taking 
the steady road of Realism, compelled her to write of the heart- 
depressing and brain-wearying trials of the one dependent life which 
she knew with a personal knowledge which inflamed her soul. She 
was not moved by the philanthropic impulse of Dickens; only thus 
could her mind flame out its painful message. 



Her Realism 39 

she knew, and made them move in the only paths 
which occurred to her, — the paths her own feet had 
trod. 

As a matter of fact, we learn but little of the cus- 
toms and manners of the localities of which she 
writes. The subjective crowds the objective. We 
hear a little, it is true, of the peripatetic " missionary- 
basket " of parochial fame ; there is some mention of 
the Whitsuntide festivities of the neighborhood ; and 
it may be discovered that in those days Mrs. Sweeney 
dispensed the soothing syrup which Mrs. Winslow has 
since made her own. But were Miss Bronte attempt- 
ing " local color," surely we should find some descrip- 
tion of the funeral arvils which the Nonconformist 
Yorkshire conscience reconciled itself to as a substi- 
tute for the Popish wake, and which had a tendency, 
it would seem from Mrs. Gaskell's description, to 
change griefs of the heart to pains in the head. She 
is silent, too, concerning that other Yorkshire custom 
referred to by her biographer, which would have fur- 
nished Mr. Bunner, let us say, with delicious morsels, 
had he been born in Thornton, — that wedding an- 
them sung in chapel, upon the first appearance of a 
newly married couple, by a band of choristers who, 
with the earnings of the occasion, invariably spent 
the following night carousing in honor of Hymen, to 
the great scandal of the neighborhood. Another au- 
thor — Hardy or Blackmore, for example — would 
have made much more out of the Gytrash than Miss 
Bronte does in * Jane Eyre.' Her first consideration 
was the portrayal of the radical elements of charac- 
ter, not the painting of scenery; and all the vivid 
beauty of her descriptive powers, and all the rare 
marvel of her rich poetic prose when engaged in the 



40 Charlotte Bronte 

depiction of woods and moors and weather, she would 
have held as secondary and accidental. 

In truth, she who in her own field is the most 
purely imaginative of all writers except Emily, is not 
an imaginative writer at all either in the portrayal of 
incidents or in the fashioning of character with other 
than her native clay. Yorkshire and Belgium are her 
only hall-marks. Her apocalyptic visions have other 
sources, — which is, perhaps, why they are apoca- 
lyptic. Her stories are thin, and have little outward 
excitement, the maniacal adventures in * Jane Eyre ' 
being the only really stirring exception. She could 
not romance for the mere pleasure of it. Only once 
did she break loose, when her affection lured her into 
the dream of Emily happily in love. But it may be 
that she was a better judge of her limitations than 
others, for ' Shirley ' ranks below her two greatest 
works. 

Hence the curates. Unlike George Eliot, she 
could not draw a really fine clergyman, never having 
met one. Mr. Hall's picture is kindly painted, but 
the talk of him is too didactically pious for our unre- 
generate taste. The purely priestly in Rivers is ex- 
cellently, if sternly, emphasized, but the asceticism 
drowns the humanity. The others seem to us mere 
caricatures. Caricatures they are not; they are of 
the type that came under her vision. 

VIII 

I would not say that Miss Bronte had the old- 
maid's attitude towards children, for that would put 
an unjust classification in view, my observation be- 
ing that among the best friends of children must be 



Her Realism 41 

reckoned their maiden aunts. Actual motherhood is 
not necessary to awaken the mother-love lying dor- 
mant in virgin breasts. But she was enveloped with 
the peculiar shyness which is as a repelling atmos- 
phere to the approach of child-confidence. In re- 
gard to the little ones, we do not find in Currer Bell 
any of those sweet springs of understanding which 
are fed from the rills of a joyous instinctive uncritical 
affection. Not that she does not observe ; she ob- 
serves keenly, but too aloofly. She is too individual : 
her truthfulness to the special portrait stands in the 
way of a general truthfulness. 

Knowing as we do some of the characteristics of 
Maria Bronte, we should hesitate to say that Helen 
Burns, her fictional representative, is an impossible 
child. On the contrary, this portrait is not a proof 
that Charlotte did not understand children, but is a 
proof that she did understand Helen Burns. But she 
is so individual that she is not typical, and we do not 
recognize any of childhood's qualities in the charac- 
ter. It is not that her talk is big; but when a pre- 
cocious infant uses large words, what gives charm 
and humor to the situation is the incongruousness of 
the childish mind grappling with thoughts as yet im- 
perfectly conceived, — the developing fancy trying to 
take root in an undeveloped intellect. His words 
share the fate of his building-blocks ; they are apt to 
come tumbling about his head before they reach the 
upper stories. There is the undivorcible child-atmos- 
phere even in the clever talk of unusual children ; 
and what makes the conversation of an extraordina- 
rily developed child quaint is the language m the 
atmosphere. But there is no such atmosphere about 
Helen Burns. She talks like an eighteenth-century 



42 Charlotte Bronte 

essayist. Her mind is not even a palimpsest, through 
the later writing of which you may discern the earlier. 
It is a grown-up mind of sixty years, without a trace 
of childhood.^ Currer Bell's children are portraits, 
but portraits only of extremely rare species, as if a 
natural historian should confine his observation to 
the grotesque in nature. 

The subject suggests an interesting topic. Know- 
ing a little of the originals of some of her extraordi- 
nary characters — Helen Burns, among others — is not 
this result of her labors an argument against a too 
keenly followed realism? Surely, the passion to set 
down all the accidents of each particular person is a 
mistaken attitude towards truth. For while there is 
no substance without accidents, actual specific obser- 
vation should be toned into a conformity with general 
laws before it is set forth to view, unless it be of that 
kind which is of itself the cause of new law. Hence 
Romance, which supplies accidents as well as realism, 
and which supplies them when the resources of 
realism fail. 

Miss Bronte's strongest characteristics are her truth- 
fulness and her intensity. She is, indeed, intense in 
her truthfulness, which, when combined with a too 
insistent realism, irritates the attention. If the child 
Helen Burns, if the child Polly, if the Yorke children, 
are the outcomes of this truthfulness to particular 
details, are we not justified in asking for a little less 
concentration on the specific, and a little more evolu- 
tion from the general? 

This fault of particularization differs, however, from 
the fault which at first sight seems akin to it, — the fault 

1 Remembering what the father said about Maria, what might 
have been ours if she and that other had lived ! 



Her Realism 43 

of the school which has arisen since her day, and which 
also aims at reality. Realism, pressed ruthlessly to 
all its minor logical outcomes, passes to its wintry 
death ; and indeed, in our latter-day work, art has 
been so exclusively employed in developing all the 
nice shades of — not character so much as every mus- 
cle which controls every motive which prompts every 
desire which works the piston of every will, that the 
vital juices run thin and dry as they sluggishly return 
to the heart of the structure. When several para- 
graphs are devoted, in the finest play of the subtlest 
of current English-writing realists, to an analysis, of 
as intricate a delicacy as the workmanship of a Da- 
mascus blade, of the dainty set of ideas started in the 
brain of a Boston lady by the discovery of the brightly 
polished condition of her door-knob, we feel that in 
the passing of that other James, there is somehow 
gone a glory from the earth. Miss Bronte would 
have had as little sympathy with such an outcome 
as she had with the romanticists ; for any system 
which involves in its last analysis the absence of large 
imaginations it would be impossible to connect with 
the name of one in whom realism was baptized in 
imagination, and whose style was fired by passion. 
She was too true to herself to be other than herself in 
her writings. The mechanical mysteries of her art 
had no charm for Currer Bell. In very truth, she 
would have denied fellowship with any craft which 
would narrow art into the grooves of a cunningly 
learned trade. 

A more extended acquaintance with these mysteries 
would have saved her from the obvious lapses of her 
straightforward method ; but as the peculiar charm 
and unique power of this writer are wrapped up in 



44 Charlotte Bronte 

her faults, — as the lapses we speak of are the neces- 
sary accidents of that method, — it would be worse 
than folly to speak of them except gratefully. They 
could not be safely followed by imitators ; it would 
be impossible to form a school upon them, because 
that would imply a dependence upon faults which, 
separated from the independence of Charlotte Bronte, 
would glare balefully. The art which conceals the 
art of the narrator in the impersonal third person, for 
example, is the only safe art for the majority ; and to 
Currer Bell's personal note, a reflection of which is 
seen in the form of all her stories (for even in ' Shir- 
ley,' Caroline Helstone, while intended as a portrait 
of Miss Nussey, is instinctively felt to be in a much 
larger way a picture of Charlotte Bronte also), are 
due most of her shortcomings. Yet what would have 
become of Jane Eyre and Lucy Snowe if their stories 
had been told by a manifest outsider? The passion 
of a personal spiritual experience could only be 
wrought into them by this particular writer making 
them stand for her particular self The first person 
comes naturally with such a complete emptying of 
the absolute into the fictional self Maybe if Miss 
Bronte's brilliant powers could have been more stead- 
ily controlled by the acquired skill of managing de- 
tails, her realism would have been guided into the 
narrow streams over which the later school floats so 
passively. But we are profoundly thankful it was not 
so, for we should then have had to look elsewhere for 
the pre-eminent prose-poet of feeling. 

There is in * Villette ' as little plot as in any pro- 
duction of the modern realists ; but the mark of diver- 
gence between the two lies in the importance which 
incidents occupy in the latter, with whom Dryden's 



Her Realism 45 

dictum is law : " No person, no incident . , . but must 
be of use to carry on the main design." Miss Bronte 
was so captivated by the study of character that what 
may be called the circumstances of her story are fre- 
quently quite accidental and apart from the principal 
motive. Her accidents do not control ; and excellent 
as her logic is, in life logic does not always control, 
and accidents often do, which are generally illogical. 
In our progression towards the end of the age, we 
have reached the days of composite photography in 
art. The present realist bases his work upon types. 
Miss Bronte took the individual individually; we now 
take the mass representatively. Who wou^ld call Ed- 
ward Rochester a typical man? or Jane Eyre a repre- 
sentative woman ? On the other hand, in Silas Lapham 
do we not recognize, not one man but fifty of our 
acquaintance? This is the glory of Charlotte Bronte, 
this is her fame. The romanticists who preceded her 
made their heroes impossible by making them do 
impossible things, from the standpoint of supposable 
experience. The histories of Rochester and Paul 
Emmanuel are the reverse of impossible ; Emman- 
uel's is even humdrum in its commonplaceness. Yet 
the characters themselves are two of the most ex- 
traordinary in fiction. Rochester is preposterous, 
not because he is called upon to do things contrary 
to nature, but because he acts strictly in accordance 
with his nature. And if the natural man within us 
grows weary of the extravagances of these gentlemen, 
the artistic man is bound to acknowledge that there 
is reason in their madness, and that their words and 
deeds are in the finest accord with the laws of their 
being. " Was ever woman in this humor wooed? " 
will be asked of Jane Eyre only by those whose ex- 



46 



Charlotte Bronte 



perience is bounded by the four walls of a conven- 
tional home. 

IX 

Purified realism is a rare enough thing to be 
thankful for. That is the sun, and the defects we 
have noticed are mere specks on its surface. The 
sunspots do not hinder the sunshine. 

We are told in ' Shirley ' that all her characters will 
be found imperfect; yet she is also determined not 
" to handle degraded or utterly infamous ones. 
Child-torturers, slave masters and drivers, I consign 
to the hands of jailers ; the novelist may be excused 
from sullying his page with the record of their 
deeds." Even as we find but few agreeable persons 
in her books, so also do we find no debasing realisms. 
There are a few jackasses, clerical and lay, one sanc- 
timonious hypocrite, a spoiled beauty or two, some 
hard continental characters, a family of tyrannical 
children, and Mrs. Reed, — strictly speaking, no vil- 
lains. She is a pure realist in one sense, although 
she placed her characters in situations which a pure 
realist of another sense would delight in making that 
sense all too evident. 

She has been blamed for those situations, and 
' Jane Eyre ' is still considered by some honest per- 
sons a dangerous book. But without temptation 
what is virtue? The glory of Charlotte Bronte is her 
spotless purity, her making virtue to shine through 
the temptation and by means of it. She is really a 
severe moralist. She condemns the ' Life of Mira- 
beau ' because it could not be put in the hands of the 
young without danger of impressing the grandeur of 
vice on a colossal scale, " whereas in vice there is 



Her Realism 47 

no grandeur, . . . only a foul, sordid, and degraded 
thing." ^ This seems like a commonplace, yet she 
wrote bitterly, for Miss Bronte's critics ventured to 
charge her with such portrayals. If the weak only 
were considered in the writing of books, no books 
worth the writing would ever be written. To the 
pure all things are pure is a hard doctrine, for so few 
are pure. Her realism never shied at ugliness, but it 
flew unharmed past sin ; nor did she commit crimes 
against art in the name of art. She holds Burns 
above Bulwer. Truth is better than art is her creed, 
just as a man is better than his clothes. But she re- 
fuses to dwell on such aspects of the truth as are 
instinctively known, and which could only do harm 
in the telling, — the finer the art, the worse the harm, 

— and which would thus militate against the ideal truth. 
We live in an age when advice from high quarters 

— if the dove-like innocence of such advice were not 
made unlikely by the hardly acquired wisdom of the 
editorial serpent — not to read a certain book be- 
cause of alleged immoralities would be hailed with 
delight by the wicked publisher, before the bulging 
eyes of whose fancy would dance, in the best tricks 
of type, the magic words, " twentieth edition ! " 
How such a warning could have been passed upon 
the possible readers of ' Jane Eyre ' has been deemed 
one of the problems of literature. The reason, per- 
haps, lay in the mixed conventionality and pruriency 
of the age, — this novel being the first to shock the 
first, in the falsely safe folds of which it was wont to 
seek the second. It was an age too dull to recog- 
nize bright innocence, all the brighter because in- 
nocently near darkness ; and too materialistic to 

1 Shorter, p. 385. 



48 Charlotte Bronte 

undertake the analysis of a situation which is obvi- 
ously (to those who know Miss Bronte) free from all 
intention of evil, because the situation is objectively 
one for evil to select. In the intention lies the harm, 
and the critics could not see it. Let us cherish the 
pious hope that somebody kicked the gaping puppy 
who compared his book with hers, in that each was 
" naughty." 

It was the author of ' Jane Eyre ' who said : 

A lover masculine so disappointed can speak and urge 
explanation ; a lover feminine can say nothing ; if she did 
the result would be shame and anguish, inward remorse for 
self-treachery. Nature would brand such demonstration as 
a rebellion against her instincts, and would vindictively re- 
pay it afterward by the thunderbolt of self-contempt smit- 
ing suddenly in secret. Take the matter as you find it : 
ask no questions, utter no remonstrances. 

and 

On my reason had been inscribed the conviction that 
unlawful pleasure, trenching on another's rights, is delusive 
and envenomed pleasure ; its hollowness disappoints at the 
time ; its poison cruelly tortures afterwards ; its effects de- 
prave forever. 

and 

I hate boldness, — that boldness which is of the brassy 
brow and insensate nerves ; but I love the courage of the 
strong heart, the fervor of the generous blood. 

And this is the key-note of all her work, which she 
sounds in a more professional way in the preface to 
the second edition of ' Jane Eyre ' : 

Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is 
not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last. 



Her Realism 49 

To pluck the mask from the face of the Pharisee is not to 
lift an impious hand to the Crown of Thorns. 

This is why she admires Thackeray so profoundly; 
and yet she takes even him to task for his Fielding 
lecture, and cries out in her splendid innocence, " I 
trust God will take from me whatever power of in- 
vention or expression I may have before he lets me 
become blind to the sense of what is fitting or unfit- 
ting to be said ! " ^ 

There are strong points of similiarity between her 
male heroes : there is in all of them the eagle quality, 
the note of dominance. That was her ideal of a man : 
she could not look up to any other kind. She found 
this also in Thackeray, and, I venture to suggest, there 
is a hint of him in Paul Emmanuel. Shirley acknowl- 
edges the estimable qualities of Sir Philip Nunnely, 
but she cannot accept him because he is not her 
master (the italicized word is Miss Bronte's). " I 
could not trust myself with his happiness; I would 
not undertake the keeping of it for thousands ; I will 
accept no hand which cannot hold me in check." 
" Improving a husband ! " exclaims Shirley, scorn- 
fully. " No. I shall insist upon my husband im- 
proving me, or else we part." 

Charlotte Bronte had no fear of the word " obey " 
in the marriage service, and would have had no sym- 
pathy with the women who jest about it; for she 
would have known that such women have not had 
their noblest natures touched, or suffer from an in- 

1 What a subject for an Imaginary Conversation would be her 
two-hour talk with the great, lovable, faulty giant, in which she 
gravely reproved him for his shortcomings, and to which he as gravely 
listened ; defending himself, however, " like a great Turk and heathen ; 
that is to say, the excuses were often worse than the crime itself 1 " 

4 



50 Charlotte Bronte 

capacity of full affection. Obedience is involved in 
love. She took the Scriptural view that man is 
stronger than woman in judgment, and that obedience 
is therefore due him. There is no fear in that love, 
for it is of the perfect kind which casteth it out, — the 
love of complete confidence. Such is her ideal man, 
and she tries to build her heroes along those lines. 
Rochester is a trifle too grand, gloomy, and peculiar 
for the taste of the average woman of this present 
day, although I understand he created great havoc 
among the sentimental ladies of the late '40's. Louis 
Moore is our old friend the Professor over again (and 
the Professor is a dreadful prig, with his besides, 
" guiding by smile and gesture," and, as if that was not 
enough, also "smiling inwardly" and "bestowing" 
" proud and contented kisses "). In our unsanctified 
moments, we have even called him a solemn donkey. 
His talk with Shirley about his " friendless young 
orphan girl " is as outrageous as Rochester's ram- 
blings with Jane. Yet that is a love scene of great 
strength, notwithstanding; and Shirley yields to the 
man who can master her Tartar better than she can 
herself. 

The genius of this girl was equal to her drawbacks ; 
and through the immaturity — one might almost say 
because of the immaturity — we see it conquering. 
Immaturity, so far from being wholly a fault, is, nega- 
tively, in given cases, an indication of genius. That 
is, the genius is so demonstrable that the immaturity 
cannot hide it; the immaturity is seen at once as the 
thin gossamer through which the sunlight shines. 
The temporal qualities of immaturity are, by their 
very poverty, contrasted with the lasting powers of 
genius, just as the sun shining through a window may 



Her Realism 51 

show hitherto unsuspected defects in the glass. Miss 
Bronte knew too well, from the home experience, the 
lapses of men from her high standard, which, I repeat, 
is the Scriptural standard. The quotation recently- 
made from her works concerning unlawful pleasure 
had its direct source in Bramwell's life, as may hardly 
be doubted when the full context is seen : 

I had once had the opportunity of contemplating, near 
at hand, an example of the results produced by a course of 
interesting and romantic domestic treachery. No golden 
halo of fiction was about this example. I saw it bare and 
real, and it was very loathsome. I saw a mind degraded 
by the practice of mean subterfuge, by the habit of perfidious 
deception, and a body depraved by the infectious influence 
of the vice-polluted soul. I had suffered much from the 
forced and prolonged view of this spectacle. 

Read also the first paragraph of Chapter XIX. of this 
same book, the ' Professor,' to see how this example 
had weighed upon her soul. 

Now, just as faith is strong only in the midst of 
faithlessness, so does she not deny her ideal because 
of her acquaintance with the actual. The actual was 
only too real to her, but the ideal was more real. 
Jane Eyre is not blinded to the moral transgressions 
and spiritual sins of Rochester. Both morally and 
spiritually she is stronger than he. Where conscience 
existed — and it existed everywhere in Charlotte 
Bronte's vision — not even love had sway, — the 
point that her critics missed ; and it was not until 
conscience had reconciled the love to its absolute 
demands that the sway was accepted. But then it 
was accepted. Rochester is a brute, you say. Yet 



52 Charlotte Bronte 

the brute in him was conquered before Jane marries 
him. It is Una and the Hon. There is a mighty 
strengtli in her heroes, especially Rochester, which 
shines back of and out of their weaknesses — the 
original strength of man as he stood in his Creator's 
plan. Her women, through love for the strength, 
subdue the weakness by accepting the strength — 

He for God only ; she for God in him. 

This is the woman's point of view, and not even the 
new woman can find fault with it as portrayed in 
Charlotte Bronte; for she makes the men to whom 
her heroines give such love acknowledge, once it is 
gained, not their superiority, but the equality of giver 
and receiver. " This is my equal," says Rochester of 
Jane. Shirley is Moore's "leopardess," — hardly an 
animal to be fondled. No reader of Charlotte Bronte 
can ever forget the magnificent repudiation of Milton's 
Eve, in ' Shirley,' yet the quotation from Milton stands, 
nevertheless. For she bows to the godlike in the 
man, and the man acknowledges the divinity in her. 
None but those who are entitled to queenhood may 
marry kings. 

We have seen her attempts at minute delineations 
are, unlike Miss Austen's, occasionally burdensome, 
because uncorrected by the application of general 
principles. It is only when her thought is freed from 
the petty harassments of her realism that she becomes 
the great writer that we know, — the greatest writer 
of passion in the English tongue. Then she rises into 
her pure native empyrean above these levels, and 
takes her rank along the high places of the immortals. 



B. — HER ATTITUDE TOWARDS NATURE 



It may be stated without much fear of contradic- 
tion that the majority of her readers will always 
pre-eminently cherish Miss Bronte as a painter of 
scenery. Atmosphere possessed her. She was en- 
veloped in the storm, the sunset was a personal glory, 
moonshine was the footstool of deity. She had both 
the " golden dreams " of Turner and the golden real- 
ities of Constable. She could picture the seraphim 
in ethereal splendor, and she could paint wind. 

Let us not take low views of this marvellous gift. 
It is not merely as scenery that we should view it. 
There is no mechanical contrivance cunningly in- 
tended to give the picture title and rank as a char- 
acter study through the medium of the surrounding 
weather conditions; the scenery is imbedded in her 
imagination, and is not arbitrarily selected for the 
purposes of interpretation. It is like the music which 
is more than a running commentary upon the text, — 
nay, at times like the music which itself forms the 
text; and the text is ever the passion of the human 
heart. 

One might relate the fluctuations in the history of 
Jane Eyre by a series of canvases picturing the 
atmospheric descriptions accompanying them ; or 
might transform into the sister art these descriptions 



54 Charlotte Bronte 

in a symphonic manner which would tease the ear 
with the rapt enthusiasm which the eye feels at the 
pictures of the words. For, as in that highest form 
of musical composition, so in this scenic power of our 
author, the rhythms are contrasted and the keys are 
related. 

Follow this history for a space, and feel the eiTect. 
The book opens in a depressed atmosphere, corre- 
sponding to that surrounding the little heroine's life. 
In the very first paragraph there is a " cold winter 
wind," bringing with it " sombre clouds." " Raw and 
chill was the winter morning" she left Gateshead. 
The afternoon of that long day's drive " came on wet 
and somewhat misty ; " and, arrived at Lowood, " rain, 
wind, and darkness filled the air," like the spiritual 
demons which were about to encompass her in that 
abode. In the night she wakes to " hear the wind 
rave in furious gusts and the rain fall in torrents; " 
and when she was compelled to rise, in the grim 
dawn, " it was bitter cold." She goes out into the 
garden : " all was wintry blight and brown decay." 

In the evening, during the play-hour, she " lifted 
a blind and looked out. It snowed fast, a drift was 
already forming against the lower panes ; putting my 
ear close to the window, I could distinguish from the 
gleeful tumult within the disconsolate moan of the 
wind outside." And mark that this is not intended 
merely to emphasize the wintry desolation of her 
young life, but to drive deep into the spirit her sym- 
pathy with the storm, and the storm's sympathy with 
her, — the two loveless outcasts when others were in- 
doors and loved. " Reckless and feverish, I wished 
the wind to howl more wildly, the gloom to deepen 
to darkness, and the confusion to rise to clamor." 



Her Attitude towards Nature ^^ 

There is always throughout the history the same 
correspondence between outside nature and inside 
life. But one does not think of this " pathetic fal- 
lacy" in following Jane Eyre's experience, with such 
beautiful unconsciousness does she enclose nature in 
the framework of her thought. It was to be expected, 
then, that the Sunday afternoon walk back from Mr. 
Brocklehurst's ministrations (remembering the physi- 
ological condition of the pupils after a day of starva- 
tion spent in a paralyzingly cold church) would be 
set forth in the usual weather strain. " At the close 
of the afternoon service we returned by an exposed 
and hilly road, where the bitter wind, blowing over a 
range of snowy summits to the north, almost flayed 
the skins from our faces." 

The raging wind carries on its wings the raging 
spirit. And as the first note of peace is touched 
when Helen Burns calms little Jane with her quaint 
and patient piety, so then for the first time we see an 
unclouded night in the sky. " Resting my head on 
Helen's shoulder, I put my arms round her waist; 
she drew me to her, and we reposed in silence. . . . 
Some heavy clouds, swept from the sky by a rising 
wind, had left the moon bare; and her light, stream- 
ing in through a window near, shone full," 

After the gloom and decay of Lowood, she sees 
before her a reawakened life at Thornfield-Hall, as 
she views the grounds from the battlements: "the 
horizon bounded by ^propitious sky, azure, marbled 
with pearly white." The tameness of the governess- 
lot soon tells on her, however, and on the evening of 
her return from that walk to Hay made memorable 
by her first meeting with Rochester at the scene of 
his accident, the excitement of that episode thrills 



56 



Charlotte Bronte 



all the more vehemently because of the returning 
stagnation. She had caught a glimpse of the out- 
side world, and there is a momentary rebellion against 
slipping on again " the viewless fetters of an uniformed 
and too still existence." 

I lingered at the gates ; I lingered on the lawn ; I paced 
backward and forwards on the pavement : the shutters of 
the glass door were closed ; I could not see into the inte- 
rior ; and both my eyes and spirit seemed drawn from the 
gloomy house — from the gray hollow filled with rayless 
cells, as it appeared to me — to that sky expanded before 
me, — a blue sea absolved from taint of cloud ; the moon 
ascending it in solemn march ; her orb seemed to look up 
as she left the hill tops, from behind which she had come, 
far and farther below her, and aspired to the zenith, mid- 
night-dark in its fathomless depth and measureless distance : 
and for those trembling stars that followed her course, they 
made my heart tremble, my veins glow when 1 viewed 
them. Little things recall us to earth : the clock struck 
in the hall ; that sufficed ; I turned from moon and stars, 
opened a side-door, and went in. 

The house was her life, filled with " rayless cells ; " 
and in that spotless night was symbolized that ideal 
life beyond the range of her piteously feeble grasp. 

The day on which she formally makes Rochester's 
acquaintance is fittingly " wild and stormy." At the 
second meeting, the winter rain beats against the 
panes ; and he unloads his Parisian memories upon 
her in " a freezing and sunless air." The night the 
maniac wife paid her terrifying visit to the second 
story was "drearily dark;" and later on, as the 
tragedy advances, and just before she confronts that 
grisly terror again, from peaceful sleep Jane opens 



Her Attitude towards Nature ^j 

her eyes on the full moon, " silver white and crystal- 
clear. It was beautiful but too solemn." Her fate 
was approaching her, — " beautiful " because she car- 
ried duty in her closed hand, but " too solemn " 
because that duty was so grievous to be borne. It 
is as descriptive as the music of ' Parsival.' The 
sympathy of and with nature is, as it were, sacramen- 
tally complete. 

Hope was shining high for Jane. Rochester was, in 
anticipation, hers. 

A splendid Midsummer shone over England : skies so 
pure, suns so radiant as were then seen in long succession, 
seldom favor, even singly, our wave-girt land. It was as if 
a band of Italian days had come from the South, like a flock 
of glorious passenger birds, and lighted on the cliffs of 
Albion. The hay was all got in ; the fields round Thorn- 
field were green and shorn ; the roads white and baked ; 
the trees were in their dark prime : hedge and wood, full- 
leaved and deeply tinted, contrasted well with the sunny 
hue of the cleared meadows between. 

Then the catastrophe draws very near. 

A waft of wind came sweeping down the laurel-walk, and 
trembled through the boughs of the chestnut : it wandered 
away — away — to an indefinite distance — it died. The 
nightingale's song was then the only voice of the hour : 
in listening to it I again wept. 

You hear the far-away echo-like sobbing of a Fate 
that would be kind, but must be harsh ; and it blends 
with the voice of the nightingale which makes her 
weep. And at the moment of his proposal, and 
while he is madly justifying to himself that crime, the 
night changes. 



58 Charlotte Bronte 

But what had befallen the night? The moon was not yet 
set and we were all in shadow : I could scarcely see my 
master's face, near as I was. And what ailed the chestnut 
tree ? it writhed and groaned ; while wind roared in the 
laurel-walk, and came sweeping over us ... a livid vivid 
spark leapt out of a cloud at which I was looking, and 
there was a crack, a crash, and a close rattling peal ; and I 
thought only of hiding my dazzled eyes against Mr. 
Rochester' s shoulder. . . . Before I left my bed in the 
morning, little Adele came running in to tell me that the 
great horsechestnut at the bottom of the orchard had been 
struck by lightning . . . and half of it split away. 

There was the Lord speaking out of Sinai, — the 
Lord who had been defied. The nearest approach 
to it in music that I can think of is the awakening of 
the trombones in the last act of Don Giovanni.' 

The third appearance of the foul nightly visitant 
immediately precedes the wedding ceremony. 

" But, Sir, as it grew dark, the wind rose : it blew yester- 
day evening not as it blows now — wild and high — but 
with a sullen moaning sound, far more eerie. I wished you 
were at home. I came into this room, and the sight of the 
empty chair and fireless hearth chilled me. For some 
reason, after I went to bed, I could not sleep — a sense of 
anxious excitement distressed me. The gale still rising 
seemed to my ear to muffle a mournful undersound : 
whether in the house or abroad I could not at first tell, but 
it recurred, doubtful yet doleful, at every lull : at last I made 
out it must be some dog howling at a distance. . . . On 
sleeping I continued in dreams the idea of a dark and 
stormy night. I continued also the wish to be with you, 
and experienced a strange, regretful consciousness of some 
barrier dividing us. During all my first sleep I was follow- 
ing the windings of an unknown road ; total obscurity 



Her Attitude towards Nature 59 

environed me ; rain pelted me ; I was burdened with the 
charge of a little child ; a very small creature too young and 
feeble to walk , and which shivered in my cold arms, and 
wailed piteously in my ear. I thought, Sir, that you were 
on the road a long way before me ; and I strained every 
nerve to overtake you, and made effort on effort to utter your 
name and entreat you to stop — but my movements were 
fettered ; and my voice still died away inarticulate ; while 
you, I felt, withdrew farther and farther every moment. . . . 
I dreamt another dream, Sir; that Thornfield-Hall was a 
dreary ruin, the retreat of bats and owls. I thought that 
of all the stately front nothing remained but a shell-like wall, 
very high and very fragile-looking. I wandered on a moon- 
light night through the grass-grown enclosure within : here 
I stumbled over a marble hearth, and there over a fallen 
fragment of cornice. Wrapped up in a shawl, I still 
carried the unknown little child ; I might not lay it down 
anywhere, however tired were my arms. ... I heard the 
gallop of a horse at a distance ... I was sure it was you ; 
and you were departing for many years, and for a distant 
country. I climbed the thin wall with frantic, perilous haste, 
eager to catch one glimpse of you from the top : the stones 
rolled from under my feet, the ivy branches I grasped gave 
way, the child clung round my neck in terror, and almost 
strangled me : at last I gained the summit. I saw you like 
a speck on a white track, lessening every moment. The 
blast blew so strong I could not stand. I sat down on the 
narrow edge ; I hushed the scared infant in my lap : you 
turned an angle of the road ; I bent forward to take a last 
look ; the wall crumbled ; I was shaken ; the child rolled 
from my knee ; I lost my balance, fell, and woke." 

" Now, Jane, that is all." 

" All the preface, Sir ; the tale is yet to come. On 
waking, a gleam dazzled my eyes : I thought — oh, it is 
daylight ! But I was mistaken : it was only candlelight. 
Sophie, I supposed, had come in. There was a light on 



6o Charlotte Bronte 

the dressing table, and the door of the closet where, before 
going to bed, I had hung my wedding dress and veil, stood 
open : I heard a rustling there. I asked, ' Sophie, what are 
you doing?' No one answered, but a form emerged from 
the closet : it took the light, held it aloft and surveyed the 
garments pendent from the portmanteau. * Sophie ! Sophie ! ' 
I again cried ; and still it was silent. I had risen up in 
bed, I bent forward : first surprise, then bewilderment 
came over me ; and then my blood crept cold through my 
veins. Mr. Rochester, this was not Sophie, it was not 
Leah, it was not Mrs. Fairfax : it was not — no, I was sure 
of it, and am still — it was not even that strange woman, 
Grace Poole." 

While awaiting Rochester's return, and feverish to 
tell him this story — 

I sought the orchard, driven to its shelter by the wind, which 
all day had blown strong and full from the south ; without, 
however, bringing a speck of rain. Instead of subsiding as 
night drew on, it seemed to augment its rush and deepen 
its roar : the trees blew steadfastly one way, never writhing 
round, and scarcely tossing back their boughs once in an 
hour ; so continuous was the strain bending their branchy 
heads northward — the clouds drifted from pole to pole, 
fast following, mass on mass : no glimpse of blue sky had 
been visible that July day. 

It was not without a certain wild pleasure I ran before 
the wind delivering my trouble of mind to the measureless 
air-torrent thundering through space. Descending the 
laurel-walk, I faced the wreck of the chestnut tree ; it stood 
up black and riven : the trunk, split down the centre, gasped 
ghastly. The cloven halves were not broken from each 
other, for the firm base and strong roots kept them unsun- 
dered below ; though community of vitality was destroyed 
— the sap could flow no more : their great boughs on each 



Her Attitude towards Nature 6i 

side were dead, and next winter's tempests would be sure to 
fell one or both to earth : as yet, however, they might be 
said to form one tree — a ruin, but an entire ruin. 

"You did right to hold fast to each other," I said: as 
if the monster splinters were living things, and could hear 
me. " I think, scathed as you look, and charred and 
scorched, there must be a little sense of life in you yet ; 
rising out of that adhesion at the faithful honest roots : 
you will never have green leaves more — never more see 
birds making nests and singing idyls in your boughs ; the 
time of pleasure and love is over with you ; but you are not 
desolate : each of you has a comrade to sympathize with 
him in his decay." As I looked up at them, the moon 
appeared momentarily in that part of the sky which filled 
their fissure ; her disk was blood-red and half overcast ; 
she seemed to throw on me one bewildered, dreary glance, 
and buried herself again instantly in the deep drift of cloud. 
The wind fell for a second, round Thornfield ; but far away 
over wood and water, poured a wild melancholy wail. 

" The sap could flow no more ! " But love, deeper 
than death, stronger than strength, righter than right, 
not even God's lightning can destroy. 

Rochester stills her fears by explaining that it was 
Grace Poole she saw, and bids her think of the mor- 
row. " Look here " (he lifted up the curtain) — " it 
is a lovely night." 

It was. Half heaven was pure and stainless : the clouds, 
now trooping before the wind, which had shifted to the west, 
were filing off eastward in long, silvered columns. The 
moon shone peacefully. 

That mirage passes, and the secret is at last 
divulged. 

A Christmas frost had come at midsummer; a white 
December storm had whirled over June; ice glazed the 



62 Charlotte Bronte 

ripe apples, drifts crushed the blowing roses ; on hay-field 
and corn-field lay a frozen shroud ; lanes which last night 
blushed full of flowers to-day were pathless with untrodden 
snow ; and the woods, which twelve hours since waved leafy 
and fragrant as groves between the tropics, now spread 
waste, wild, and white as pine forests in wintry Norway. 
My hopes were all dead-struck with a subtle doom, such as 
in one night fell on all the firstborn in the land of Egypt. 
I looked on my cherished wishes, yesterday so blooming 
and glowing ; they lay stark, still, livid corpses that could 
never revive. 

Thus is the ardent expectancy of bridehood turned 
for Jane Eyre into the bitter-cold desolation of disap- 
pointment ; and how subtle the elemental feeling by 
which wintry nature is transmuted, through wither- 
ing descending scales, into the conditions of her life! 
It is not a mere likeness between the blight of winter 
and the death of hope : what chills her to the marrow 
is that her faith and confidence in her lover are de- 
stroyed, — that "the attitude of stainless truth was gone 
from his idea," the rich full flower of his manhood 
had perished fruitless. " Signs," she says, " for aught 
we know, may be but the sympathies of Nature with 
man." 

II 

The true nature-lover is the true nature-sympathizer. 
There is complete reciprocity between what Nature 
gives to him and what he to her. There is not neces- 
sarily a complete comprehension, but there is that 
highest form of faith, — a complete acceptance even 
of the incomprehensible. Such faith partakes too 
largely of reverence to allow fear to enter its despoil- 



Her Attitude towards Nature 63 

ing wedge; for this attitude towards nature under- 
stands spiritually what it cannot comprehend by reason, 
and the product is awe. The " most natural" natures 
have it ; and wherever there is any spiritual possession 
of a man, there may it be found, though the mind be 
also possessed of shifting quirks. Charlotte Bronte 
had no love for the Jesuits, but she is candid enough 
to include the " good father " who had her in spiritual 
tow with herself in her freedom from fright at the 
awful storm which overtook them in the house of 
Mme. Walravens. He had some grandeur in him ; 
he had a simple faith in an elementary God back of 
his theological complexities, and that simplicity saved 
him from vulgar fear. In that presence, the socially 
timid Miss Bronte had none, either. For Lucy says: 
" I, too, was awe-struck. Being, however, under no 
pressure of slavish terror, my thoughts and observa- 
tions were free." Of course. That is a part of her 
spiritual glory, and which she shares with others of 
lesser fame, but of similar attitudes. 

Only, she goes farther into nature than others : she 
goes farther into it, without consciously pursuing it. 
She is not striving for effect by a ceremoniously evident 
attachment; and she would, without doubt, if living 
now, disclaim alliance with the class of present writers 
which takes objective delight in the delineating of 
scenery. I have said that atmosphere possessed her, 
and I have tried to demonstrate how it entered into 
her work. It was of the fibres of her brain, which, of 
necessity, wrapped the brain's concept with its texture. 
Her use of nature is more than natural ; it is inevita- 
ble. 

In dealing with Charlotte Bronte, we are dealing 
with spirit as opposed to flesh. She does not divorce 



64 Charlotte Bronte 

the two in the old scholastic way ; there is no theo- 
logical enmity between them ; she sufifered, on the 
contrary, from their close alliance. But she was 
touched, almost exclusively, on the spiritual side. 
Pure imagination ruled her. More than any other 
author, I believe, she exemplifies the idea of the met- 
aphysicians in their term " productive imagination, " 
— " that faculty by which the parts of the intuitions 
of space and time are combined into continua." It is 
untutored, untamed, pure. The three sketches which 
Jane Eyre produces from her portfolio at Rochester's 
request are, I submit, the three finest examples in 
any one book of this spiritual power. 

The first represented clouds low and livid, rolling over a 
swollen sea : all the distance was in eclipse ; so, too, was 
the foreground ; or rather, the nearest billows, for there was 
no land. One gleam of light lifted into relief a half-sub- 
merged mast, on which sat a cormorant, dark and large, 
with wings flecked with foam ; its beak held a gold bracelet, 
set with gems, that I had touched with as brilliant tints as 
my palette could yield, and as glittering distinctness as my 
pencil could impart. Sinking below the bird and mast, a 
drowned corpse glanced through the green water ; a fair 
arm was the only limb clearly visible, whence the bracelet 
had been washed and torn. 

The second picture contained for foreground only the dim 
peak of a hill, with grass and some leaves slanting as if by a 
breeze. Beyond and above spread an expanse of sky, dark 
blue as at twilight : rising into the sky was a woman's shape 
to the bust, portrayed in tints as dusk and soft as I could 
combine. The dim forehead was crowned with a star : the 
lineaments below were seen as through the suffusion of 
vapour ; the eyes shone dark and wild ; the hair streamed 
shadowy, like a beamless cloud torn by storm or by electric 



Her Attitude towards Nature 6^ 

travail. On the neck lay a pale reflection like moonlight ; 
the same faint lustre touched the train of thin clouds from 
which rose and bowed the vision of the Evening Star. 

The third showed the pinnacle of an iceberg piercing a 
polar winter sky : a muster of northern lights reared their 
dim lances, close serried, along the horizon. Throwing 
these into distance, rose, in the foreground, a head, — a 
colossal head, inclined towards the iceberg, and resting 
against it. Two thin hands, joined under the forehead, and 
supporting it, drew up before the lower features a sable veil ; 
a brow quite bloodless, white as bone, and an eye hollow 
and fixed, blank of meaning but for the glassiness of despair, 
alone were visible. Above the temples, amidst wreathed 
turban folds of black drapery, vague in its character and con- 
sistency as cloud, gleamed a ring of white flame, gemmed 
with sparkles of a more lurid tinge. This pale crescent was 
" the likeness of a Kingly Crown ; " what it diademed was 
" the shape which shape had none." 

On that magnificent night of the f^te, when Mme. 
Beck endeavored, through the operation of a sedative, 
to hold her English teacher in subjection, the drug 
merely excited her. 

Instead of stupor came excitement. I became alive to 
new thought — to reverie peculiar in coloring. A gathering 
call ran among the faculties, their bugles sang, their trumpets 
rang an untimely summons. Imagination was roused from 
her rest, and she came forth impetuous and venturous. With 
scorn she looked on Matter, her mate. " Rise ! " she said. 
" Sluggard ! this night I will have my will ; nor shalt thou 
prevail." 

" Look forth and view the night ! " was her cry, and when 
I lifted the heavy blind from the casement close at hand — 
with her own royal gesture, she showed me a moon supreme, 
in an element deep and splendid. 

5 



66 * Charlotte Bronte 

To my gasping senses she made the glimmering gloom, the 
narrow limits, the oppressive heat of the dormitory, intoler- 
able. She lured me to leave this den and follow her forth 
into dew, coolness, and glory. 

She recalls having seen a gap in the paling of the 
park fence. She determines that she will try thus to 
steal into this deserted park, where she will be abso- 
lutely alone at such an hour. " The whole park 
would be mine, the moonlight, midnight park ! " 
She does not find it deserted, as we know; but after 
all the fever and the glamour of the f^te had passed, 
as Lucy seeks again the " dim lower quarter," she 
finds the moon of her search. 

Dim I should not say, for the beauty of moonlight, for- 
gotten in the park, here once more flowed in upon percep- 
tion. High she rode, and calm and stainlessly she shone. 
The music and the mirth of the fete, the fire and bright 
hues of those lamps had outdone and outshone her for an 
hour, but now, again, her glory and her silence triumphed. 
The rival lamps were dying : she held her course like a 
white fate. Drum, trumpet, bugle, had uttered their clangor 
and were forgotten : with pencil-ray she wrote on heaven 
and earth records for archives everlasting. She and those 
stars seemed to me at once the types and witnesses of truth 
all regnant. The night-sky lit her reign : like its slow- 
wheeling progress, advanced her victory, — that onward 
movement which has been, and is, and will be from eter- 
nity to eternity. 

Paul Emmanuel, lingering in the garden, looks 
" at the moon, at the gray cathedral over the re- 
moter spires and house roofs fading into a blue sea 
of night-mist. He tasted the sweet breath of dusk, 
and noted the folded bloom of the garden." Who 



Her Attitude towards Nature 67 

else has so delicately expressed that exquisite sense of 
perfumed eventide, — that unnamable sacred-human 
presence of the haunting vesper spirit? 

Her finest similes are based on nature. Saint Pierre's 
power over her unruly pupils held " them in check as 
a breezeless frost-air might still a brawling stream." 
The fair visitors at Thornfield-Hall descend the stair- 
case " almost as noiselessly as a bright mist rolls 
down a hill." These fine ladies " all had a sweeping 
amplitude of array that seemed to magnify their per- 
sons as a mist magnifies the moon." It is not every 
day that one may read in one book two such similes 
based on the effects of mist. When the Orders in 
Council were repealed, " Liverpool started and 
snorted like a river-horse roused amongst his reeds 
by thunder." 

So, too, the adjectives which come at her nod have 
the fine fitness which nature demands, — the fitness 
which makes one cry out, " None other would have 
done at all ! " The rain falls " heavy, pi'one, and 
broad." The beck sends a " raving" sound through 
the air. She has twice put into living words the 
swelling emotions all travellers open to its influ- 
ence must feel who stand below the great dome of 
St. Paul's in the solemn night time: 

It, too, is dear to my soul ; for there, as I lay in quiet 
and darkness, I first heard the great bell of St. Paul's tell- 
ing London it was midnight ; and well do I recall the deep 
deliberate tones, so full charged with colossal phlegm and 
force. 

I had just extinguished my candle and lain down, when 
a deep, low, mighty tone swung through the night. At first 
I knew it not ; but it was uttered twelve times, and at the 
twelfth colossal hum and trembling knell, I said, " I lie in 



68 Charlotte Bronte 

the shadow of St. Paul's." . . . Above my head, above the 
house-tops, co-elevate almost with the clouds, I saw a sol- 
emn orbed mass, dark-blue and dim — The Dome. While 
I looked my inner self moved ; my spirit shook its always 
fettered wings half loose ; I had a sudden feeling as if I, 
who had never yet truly lived, were at last about to taste 
life ; in that morning my soul grew as fast as Jonah's 
gourd. 

This grave bass glides into softest treble when she 
writes, with equal insight, of "sweet, soft, exalted" 
sounds. Oh, carillons of Bruges ! 



Ill 

In discussing Charlotte, one must speak of Emily 
also, — that untamed virgin of the moors, to whom 
they were as the call of the sea to the mariner, and 
as strong drink to the drunkard. Younger in years 
and in grace, she was yet the elder sister in her atti- 
tude towards nature, as paganism is older than Chris- 
tianity. With her, nature was the thing worshipped, 
not the milieu through which worship was done. It 
is expressed in Catherine's dream : 

" If I were in heaven, Nelly, I should be extremely 
miserable." 

" Because you are not fit to go there," I answered. " All 
sinners would be miserable in heaven." 

" But it is not for that. I dreamt once that I was there ; 
. . . heaven did not seem to be my home ; and I broke 
my heart with weeping to come back to earth ; and the 
angels were so angry that they flung me out into the middle 
of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights, where I 
woke sobbing for joy." 



Her Attitude towards Nature 69 

I shall have to show, in the next section, how she 
was like Charlotte, and yet greater than Charlotte, in 
her conception of love; but let me here point out, 
in passing, her place, along with her less terrible sis- 
ter, among the great nature portrayers. 

Emily Bronte has been called the Sphinx of litera- 
ture. We have only * Wuthering Heights ' to tell us, 
in a mystery, what she was, — that and a handful of 
poems, Charlotte's loving testimony, and this from 
' Shirley ' : 

A still, deep, inborn delight glows in her young veins ; 
unmingled, untroubled, not to be reached or ravished by 
human agency, because by no human agency bestowed : 
the pure gift of God to his creature, the free dower of 
Nature to her child. This joy gives her experience of a 
genii-life. Buoyant, by green steps, by glad hills, all ver- 
dure and light, she reaches a station scarcely lower than 
that whence angels looked down on the dreamer of Beth-el, 
and her eye seeks, and her soul possesses, the vision of life 
as she wishes it. No, not as she wishes it : she has not 
time to wish : the swift glory spreads out, sweeping and 
kindhng, and multiplies its splendors faster than Thought 
can effect his combinations, faster than Aspiration can utter 
her longings. . . . 

If Shirley were not an indolent, a reckless, an ignorant 
being, she would take a pen at such moments ; or at least 
while the recollection of such moments was yet fresh on 
her spirit : she would seize, she would fix the apparition, 
tell the vision revealed. Had she a little more of the organ 
of acquisitiveness in her head, a little more of the love of 
property in her nature, she would take a good-sized sheet 
of paper and write plainly out, in her own queer but clear 
and legible hand, the story that has been narrated, the song 
that has been sung to her, and thus possess what she was 



70 Charlotte Bronte 

enabled to create. But indolent she is, reckless she is, and 
most ignorant, for she does not know her dreams are rare, 
her feelings peculiar : she does not know, has never known, 
and will die without knowing, the full value of that spring 
whose bright fresh bubbling in her heart keeps it green. 

And as Moore soliloquizes of Shirley, so Charlotte 
of Emily : 

. . . her deep dark eyes : difficult to describe what I 
read there ! Pantheress ! — beautiful forest-born ! — wily, 
tameless, peerless nature ! She gnaws her chain : I see the 
white teeth working at the steel! She has dreams of her 
wild woods, and pinings after virgin freedom. . . Some 
hours ago she passed me, coming down the oak-staircase 
to the hall : she did not know I was standing in the twi- 
light, near the staircase window, looking at the frost-bright 
constellations. How closely she glided against the banisters ! 
How shyly shone her large eyes upon me ! How evanescent, 
fugitive, fitful, she looked, — slim and swift as a Northern 
Streamer ! ... In her white evening dress ; with her long 
hair flowing full and wavy ; with her noiseless step, her pale 
cheek, her eye full of night and lightning, she looked, I 
thought, spirit-like, — a thing made of an element, — the 
child of a breeze and a flame, — the daughter of ray and 
raindrop, — a thing never to be overtaken, arrested, fixed. 

The vigor of her feeling may be pretty accurately 
described in the younger Catherine's breezy idea of 
" heaven's happiness," as opposed to Linton's : 

He said the pleasantest manner of spending a hot July 
day was lying from morning till evening on a bank of heath 
in the middle of the moors, with the bees humming dreamily 
about among the bloom, and the larks singing high up over- 
head, and the blue sky and bright sun shining steadily and 



Her Attitude towards Nature 71 

cloudlessly. That was his most perfect idea of heaven's 
happiness : mine was rocking in a rustling green tree, with 
a west wind blowing, and bright white clouds flitting rapidly 
above ; and not only larks, but throstles, and blackbirds, 
and linnets, and cuckoos pouring out music on every side, 
and the moors seen at a distance, broken into cool dusky 
dells; but close by great swells of long grass undulating 
in waves to the breeze ; and woods and sounding water, 
and the whole world awake and wild with joy. He wanted 
all to lie in an ecstacy of peace ; I wanted all to sparkle 
and dance in a glorious jubilee. I said his heaven would 
be only half alive ; and he said mine would be drunk ; I 
said I should fall asleep in his ; and he said he could not 
breathe in mine. . . . 

We have seen how picturesquely Charlotte im- 
presses the word " beamless " into use. So Emily: 
" all that remained of day was a bcamless amber light 
along the west." The gaunt thorns around Wuther- 
ing Heights " stretch their limbs one way, as if craving 
alms of the sun." There is a picture which dwells in 
the memory for all time. And she shares with Char- 
lotte her power to select the one word, of all the 
words she might have selected, which hits conscious- 
ness as a blow hits the face, nailing the thought into 
the attention by an almost physical force. In the 
description of Vashti, Charlotte contrasts the heavy, 
sensual ' Cleopatra ' she has previously been criticis- 
ing with the vivid living force of the wonderful 
actress : " Place now the Cleopatra or any other 
slug before her as an obstacle, and see her cut 
through the pulpy mass, as the scimitar of Saladin 
clave the down cushion." Thus, Emily speaks of the 
"smiting beauty" of a face. Her eye had pierced 
the dark veil which hangs before the penetralia of 



72 Charlotte Bronte 

that nether world which the Furies call their home, 
and in one burning sentence she gives us a whirling 
glance thereat: " the clouded windows of hell flashed 
a moment towards me," 

Like Emily, Charlotte is never afraid of Nature, 
and does not realize her terrors. 

Strong and horizontal thundered the current of the wind 
from northwest to southeast ; it brought rain like spray, and 
sometimes a sharp hail like shot. ... I bent my head to 
meet it, but it beat me back. My heart did not fail me at 
all in this conflict. I only wished that I had wings, and 
could ascend the gale, spread and repose my pinions on its 
strength, career in its course, sweep where it swept. 

One night a thunder storm broke ; a sort of hurricane 
shook us in our beds : the Catholics rose in panic and 
prayed to their saints. As for me, the tempest took hold 
of me with tyranny : I was roughly roused and obliged to 
live. I got up and dressed myself, and creeping outside 
the casement close to my bed, sat on its ledge, with my feet 
on the roof of a lower adjoining building. It was wet, it 
was wild, it was pitch-dark. Within the dormitory, they 
gathered round the night-lamp in consternation, praying 
loud. I could not go in : too resistless was the delight of 
staying with the wild hour, black and full of thunder, pealing 
out such an ode as language never delivered to man — too 
terribly glorious the spectacle of clouds, split and pierced by 
white blinding bolts. 

Who can ever forget Shirley's sublime apostrophe 
which was doubtless a reflection of Emily's unspoken 
thought? 

" Nature is now at her evening prayers : she is kneeling 
before those red hills. I see her prostrate on the great 



Her Attitude towards Nature 73 

steps of her altar, praying for a fair night for mariners at sea, 
for travellers in deserts, for lambs on moors, and unfledged 
birds in woods. Caroline, I see her ! and I will tell you 
what she is like : she is like what Eve was when she and 
Adam stood alone on earth." 

"And that is not Milton's Eve, Shirley." 
" Milton's Eve ! Milton's Eve ! I repeat. No, by the 
pure Mother of God, she is not ! . . . He saw heaven : he 
looked down on hell. He saw Satan, and Sin his daughter, 
and Death their horrible offspring. Angels serried before 
him their battalions : the long lines of adamantine shields 
flashed back on his blind eye-balls the unutterable splendor 
of heaven. Devils gathered their legions in his sight : their 
dim, discrowned, and tarnished armies passed rank and file 
before him. Milton tried to see the first woman ; but, 
Gary, he saw her not." 

" You are bold to say so, Shirley." 

" Not more bold than faithful. It was his cook that he 
saw ; or it was Mrs. Gill, as I have seen her, making cus- 
tards in the heat of summer, in the cool dairy, with rose 
trees and nasturtiums about the latticed window, preparing 
a cold collation for the Rectors. ... I would beg to re- 
mind him that the first men of the earth were Titans, and 
that Eve was their mother : from her sprang Saturn, Hy- 
perion, Oceanus ; she bore Prometheus — " 

" Pagan that you are ! what does that signify? " 
" I say there were giants on the earth in those days : 
giants that strove to scale heaven. The first woman's breast 
that heaved with life on this world yielded the daring which 
could contend with Omnipotence : the strength which could 
bear a thousand years of bondage, — the vitality which could 
feed that vulture death through uncounted ages, — the un- 
exhausted life and uncorrupted excellence, sisters to immor- 
tality, which, after millenniums of crimes, struggles, and woes, 
could conceive and bring forth a Messiah. The first woman 
was heaven- born : vast was the heart whence gushed the 



74 Charlotte Bronte 

well-spring of the blood of nations ; and grand the unde- 
generate head where rested the consort-crown of creation. 

" I saw — I now see — a woman-Titan : her robe of 
blue air spreads to the outskirts of the heath, where yonder 
flock is grazing ; a veil white as an avalanche sweeps from 
her head to her feet, and arabesques of lightning flame on 
its borders. Under her breast I see her zone, purple like 
that horizon : through its blush shines the star of evening. 
Her steady eyes I cannot picture ; they are clear — they are 
deep as lakes — they are lifted and full of worship — they 
tremble with the softness of love and the lustre of prayer. 
Her forehead has the expanse of a cloud, and is paler than 
the early moon, risen long before dark gathers : she reclines 
her bosom on the ridge of Stilbro' Moor ; her mighty hands 
are joined beneath it. So kneeling, face to face, she 
speaks with God. That Eve is Jehovah's daughter, as Adam 
was his son." 

*' She is very vague and visionary ! Come, Shirley, we 
ought to go into church." 

" Caroline, I will not : I will stay out here with my 
mother, Eve, in these days called Nature. I love her — un- 
dying, mighty being ! Heaven may have faded from her 
brow when she fell in paradise ; but all that is glorious on 
earth shines there still. She is taking me to her bosom, and 
showing me her heart. Hush, Caroline ! you will see her 
and feel as I do, if we are both silent." 

" It is well that the true poet," says Miss Bronte, 
" can measure the whole stature of those who look 
down on him, and correctly ascertain the weight and 
value of the pursuits they disdain him for not having 
followed. It is happy that he can have his own bliss, 
his own society with his great friend and goddess, Na- 
ture, quite independent of those who find little pleasure 
in him, and in whom he finds no pleasure at all." 



Her Attitude towards Nature j^ 

Nature is her " great friend " also, but more of a 
divine priestess than a " goddess," as she was with 
Emily. UnHke Emily, she looks through nature, up 
to nature's God ; and if in the rush of her emotion, 
she at times confuses the glory and its reflection, it is 
as if one might, in rapt moments, fail to distinguish 
the image from the imaged. Nature was to her, not 
so much a sacred book to be unsealed only with 
mystic rites, as it was a solemn running commentary 
upon a passionately conceived, dimly understood, 
and bravely borne existence. Life was the mystery, 
Nature the priest, she the pale but ready victim. 
Hence the eloquence of her descriptions. The priest- 
like Nature stands between her and life, and pleads 
for her to Life. Nature is not the mystery — that lies 
beyond; but Nature expounds and exemplifies. That 
is why we do not think of rhetoric when we think of 
all this passionate writing. It is rhetoric ; but, as when 
in the glow of a noble liturgy, we are not conscious 
of it. 

There is, in the place of world-knowledge, what is 
so much better, earth-knowledge. Happy the union ! 
For old Nature soothes the dumb ague of despair 
into something resembling calm. 

Yonder sky was sealed : the solemn stars shone alien 
and remote ; . . . she felt as if Something far round drew 
nigher. She heard as if Silence spoke. There was no lan- 
guage, no word, only a tone. Again, a fine, full, lofty 
tone, a deep soft sound, like a storm whispering, made 
twilight undulate. 

That Presence, invisible but mighty, gathered her in like 
a lamb to the fold ; that voice, soft but all-pervading, 
vibrated through her heart like music. Her eye received 



76 Charlotte Bronte 

no image ; and yet a sense visited her vision and her brain 
as of the serenity of stainless air, the power of sovereign 
seas, the majesty of marching stars, the energy of colliding 
elements, the rooted endurance of hills wide-based, and 
above all, as of the lustre of heroic beauty rushing victo- 
rious on the night, vanquishing its shadows like a diviner sun. 

Twilight was falling, and I deemed its influence pitiful ; 
from the lattice I saw coming night clouds trailing low like 
banners drooping. 

and that matchless passage, 

The moon reigns glorious, glad of the gale, — as glad as 
if she gave herself to his fierce caress with love, 

which causes Mr. Swinburne to exclaim, " The words 
have in them the very breath and magic, and riotous 
radiance, the utter rapture and passion and splendor 
of the high sonorous night." " It is," he declares, 
" the first and last absolute and sufificient and trium- 
phant word ever to be said on the subject." Surely, 
surely, if ever the stigmata of inspiration were 
stamped with ineffaceable imprint on any work, in 
hers may the miraculous marks be found. 



IV 

There is no painter of scenery, no painter of 
atmosphere, like her. 

Dawn was just beginning to steal on night, to penetrate 
with a pale ray its brown obscurity, and give a demi-trans- 
lucence to its opaque shadows ; ... no color tinged the 
east, no flush warmed it. To see what a heavy lid day 



Her Attitude towards Nature 77 

slowly lifted, what a wan glance she flung along the hills, 
you would have thought the sun's fire quenched in last 
night's floods ; . . . a raw wind stirred the mass of night- 
cloud, and showed, as it slowly rose — leaving a colorless, 
silver-gleaming ring all round the horizon — not blue sky, 
but a stratum of paler vapor beyond. 

But it is remarkable that this descriptive power is 
yoked with her studies of character; her finest pas- 
sages inevitably lead up to some effect upon the 
mind. The scenery is a parable, a miracle; a human 
life is the thing signified, the thing wrought upon. 
As William Crimsworth walks home from Frances 
Henri's abode, his affections stirred, and his ambi- 
tions aroused to meet them, he feels " the West be- 
hind him;" and before him rose "the arch of an 
evening rainbow." Brain, not only eye, absorbed the 
scene, for that night in a dream it was reproduced. 

I stood, methought, upon a terrace ; I leaned over a 
parapeted wall ; there was space below me, depth I could 
not fathom, but hearing an endless dash of waves, I be- 
lieved it to be the sea ; sea spread to the horizon ; sea of 
changeful green and intense blue. All was soft in the dis- 
tance ; all vapor-veiled. A spark of gold glistened on the 
line between water and air, floated up, approached, en- 
larged, changed ; the object hung midway between heaven 
and earth, under the arch of the rainbow ; the soft but dusk 
clouds diffused behind. It hovered as on wings ; pearly, 
fleecy, gleaming air streamed like raiment round it ; light, 
tinted with carnation, colored what seemed face and limbs ; 
a large star shone with still lustre on an angel's forehead ; 
an upraised arm and hand, glancing like a ray, pointed to 
the bow overhead, and a voice in my heart whispered, — 
Hope smiles on Effort. 



78 Charlotte Bronte 

I have referred to the passage where Yorke con- 
fesses the meanness of his attitude towards Mary- 
Cave, As he is about to utter the words, — 

" The moon is up," was his first not quite relevant re- 
mark, pointing with his whip across the moor. " There she 
is, riding into the haze, staring at us wi' a strange red glower. 
She is no more silver than old Helstone's brow is ivory. 
What does she mean by leaning her cheek on Rushedge i' 
that way, and looking at us wi' a scowl and a menace ? " 

Why does the moon scowl at Yorke? Why is not 
her light silvery for him? Because of his guilty con- 
science. She sets her pure light against his turgid 
wilfulnesSj and its purity is tinged with the defiling 
color of his sin. Had he been spotless, she would 
have had no menace in her glow. He is arrested like 
Saul of Tarsus. She stands a divine advocate for the 
innocence he has lost. 

We thus see that nature does not exist for her by 
and for itself, but as mysteriously wrapped about 
human destiny, and as in sympathy with human 
character. Human character she undoubtedly con- 
sidered her first and foremost study, and all her 
glowing scenic descriptions bear a close approxima- 
tion to such a study. She was, indeed, a keen ana- 
lyzer of character; and although at times, through 
her ignorance of the world, too prim and too severe, 
the mistakes she makes are on the safe side of over- 
conscientiousness. Take her study of this same Yorke. 
Let us put his contradictions into parallels : 

Sometimes spoke broad York- Sometimes pure English. 

shire. 

Blunt and rough. Polite and affable. 

Without ideality. Yet a fine ear for music. 



Her Attitude towards Nature 79 

Indocile, scornful, sarcastic. Unusual taste, a connoisseur 

of art, a travelled man, a 
scholar, and a gentleman. 
Grossl}' intolerant against lords Excellent general doctrines of 

and parsons. mutual toleration. 

His religious belief without Not irreligious, 
awe, imagination, tender- 
ness. 
Family pride. Professor of " equality." 

Haughty as Beelzebub to those Very kind to all beneath him. 

above him. 
Impatient of imbecility. Honorable, capable, and re- 

spected. 



THE KEY. 

He was a Yorkshire gentleman. He had no ven- 
eration, " a great want, . . . which throws a man 
wrong on every point where veneration is required." 
He was without the organ of comparison, " a defi- 
ciency which strips a man of sympathy." " He had 
little of the organs of benevolence and ideality, 
which took the glory and softness from his nature." 
Every contradiction in this highly original character 
(are not all original characters contradictory?) is 
thus explained, and the picture is as clear-cut as the 
Vienna onyx. 

As for me, whenever a purple sunset streaks the 
West, whenever the moon rises " in an element deep 
and splendid," whenever the soul swells with killing 
pains on silent moon-filled nights, I think of Char- 
lotte Bronte. I think of the pang of all the world, the 
unutterable cries, the low moans, the stifled sobs, 
which well up into the pitying skies, and shine there 
on the stricken earth. Whenever I lie awake in the 



8o Charlotte Bronte 

night watches listening to the wind [" Peace, peace, 
Banshee, keening at every window! "], I think of a 
pure upHfted face at a parsonage lattice in a York- 
shire wilderness : God and the awful stars above, the 
graves of buried loves beneath, and all about the 
ineffable haunting witchery of the loud-whispering 
moors. 



C — HER PASSION 



It is a significant commentary upon numan nature 
that the word passion should have come to have a 
meaning directly opposite to its original import, 
because the secondary definitions indicate the lapses 
of that nature from the ideal equipoise of character. 
The word means, in its simplicity, passivity, as op- 
posed to activity, — hence, susceptibility, receptivity; 
which implies, when the active force at work is pain- 
ful, suffering. As the greatest suffering known in 
history, resulting from the most acute susceptibility, 
made the most intense by the completest passivity, 
the agony of Christ preceding His death upon the 
cross is, with an immediately recognized perfect ap- 
propriateness, termed for all time THE PASSION. 
The secondary meanings attached to the word as 
now generally used relate, as do most secondary 
meanings, to a state of mind proceeding from such 
susceptibility as the original meaning sets forth, viz., 
vehement emotion, evidenced by violent displays of 
feeling. That is to say, from a perfect passivity, as 
in the ideal historical case, the word flies to the 
opposite meaning of extreme activity, because the 
imperfections of human nature are so rarely under 
the control of the rational faculties when their springs 
are disturbed. 

6 



82 Charlotte Bronte 

All true passion, then, is simple suffering, due to 
extreme susceptibility, and is opposed by a whole 
circumference to the idea of action. As such passion 
approximates to the ideal passion, it is perforce 
noble ; differing from that in the degree of its nobil- 
ity by the difference between the nobly human, and 
yet because human, imperfect, and the inevitably 
divine. 

I claim for Charlotte Bronte a place in this pan- 
theon. She suffered and was still, except for her 
books not meant to be discovered as hers, and 
through which we feel her shaken soul. It was not 
a pleading/;?;' passion, as the critics vainly imagined, 
but the pleading of passion. " My God, my God, 
why hast Thou forsaken me?" Let those who im- 
pugn Charlotte Bronte for crying out in her pain 
solve that mystery of the Cross. 

II 

The attempt to prove from internal and external 
evidence that the sadness of ' Villette ' is traceable to 
an unhappy love experience is, in my judgment, 
futile and inexcusable. The actual external is twisted, 
in order to fit it to the supposed internal, evidence ; 
which is a fatal course in the hunt for truth. 

" I returned to Brussels after aunt's death, against 
my conscience, prompted by what then seemed an 
irresistible impulse. I was punished for my selfish 
folly by a total withdrawal, for more than two years, 
of happiness and peace of mind." ^ This is the fa- 
mous passage which has set the guessers at work, from 

1 'Charlotte Bronte. A monograph.' By T. Wemyss Reid. New 
York : Scribner, Armstrong & Co., 1877, p. 59. 



Her Passion 83 

Sir Wemyss Reid to Mr. MacKay ; ^ the latter gentle- 
man using it for the base of a very elaborate structure. 
It is a pity that the fine dialectical skill which cut to 
pieces Dr. Wright's nice little romance ^ did not rest 
its well-earned repute at the end of that enjoyable 
performance ; for the author himself is obliged to 
confess that the point is not absolutely proved, but 
only strongly suggested.^ 

Mr. MacKay bases his argument on what he well 
calls Charlotte's "element," — the depiction of the 
agony of love. " Nowhere else are to be found 
such piercing cries of lonely anguish as may be 
heard in * Shirley 'and ' Villette.' They are the very de 
profimdis of love sunk in the abyss of despair." ^ He 
quotes her statement that she will never affect what 
she has not experienced. Putting the two together, 
the conclusion is that " the characteristic experiences 
recorded in her books were not gained at Haworth : 
there is no room for any love tragedy there." ^ In 
Brussels, therefore, must we search for the solution. 
Now, Charlotte could love only an intellectual man. 
M. Heger was such a man. He it was, then, whom 
Charlotte loved. 

Mr. Nicholls and Miss Nussey, the two best and 
the only two living authorities, maintain that the 

1 ' The Brontes. Fact and Fiction.' By Angus MacKay. New 
York: Dodd, Mead & Co. London : Service & Baton. 1S97. 

2 ' The Brontes in Ireland, or Facts Stranger than Fiction.' By 
Dr. William Wright. New York : D. Appleton & Co., 1893. This 
is the remarkable book which startled Bronteans with the astounding 
statement that ' Wuthering Heights ' had its foundation in the family 
history in Ireland, and that Charlotte derived her inspiration from 
the same source. It was received with much applause and open-eyed 
wonder, but with the caveats of the thoughtful. For its complete 
confutation, see Mr. MacKay's book, above mentioned. 

5 MacKay, p. 73. * lb., p. 41. ^ lb., p. 45. 



84 



Charlotte Bronte 



particular reason for Charlotte's anxiety at this time 
was a dread of leaving her father to the unchecked 
temptations of a " too festive curate." ^ After her 
first return from Brussels, she writes that she has felt 
for some months that she ought not to be away from 
him; 2 and later: "Whenever I consult my con- 
science, it affirms that I am doing right in staying at 
home, and bitter are its upbraidings when I yield to 
an eager desire for release." ^ But this filial feeling 
is not enough for Mr. MacKay, on the ground that 
she returns to Haworth after a stay in Brussels of 
only otte year, when the father was speedily rescued ; 
whereas it was for two years that she suffered this 
unhappiness. The visit to the confessional is men- 
tioned ; the extravagant thanks to Mary Taylor for 
her advice to leave Brussels,* and the grief at parting 
with Heger^ are urged as illuminating indications of 
the truth of the hypothesis. The cessation of the 
correspondence with Heger, through the intervention 
of his wife, is made much of. 

Turning to the novel, " we are surprised to find 
how absolutely Charlotte accepts M. Heger as her 
beau ideal." ^ All of her heroes have a dash of the 
pedagogue. Helstone, Louis Moore, Crimsworth are 
" merely paler copies of the same original." Char- 
lotte's vision was haunted by this figure. Note, too, 

1 Shorter, p. 109. [Since this was written, Miss Nussey has died.] 

2 " You will ask me why. It is on papa's account ; he is now, as you 
know, getting old, and it grieves me to tell you that he is losing his 
sight. ... I felt now that it would be selfish to leave him (at least as 
long as Bramwell and Anne are absent) in order to pursue selfish 
interests of my own. With the help of God I will try to deny myself 
in this matter and to wait." Gaskell, p. 278. 

3 Gaskell, pp. 325, 326. * MacKay, p. 59. 
5 Gaskell, p. 278. ® MacKay, p. 63. 



Her Passion 85 

" the frequency of love scenes between master and 
pupil in these works." Even the theme of 'Jane 
Eyre ' is similar in its picture of a woman's love for a 
man who belongs to another woman. She could not 
make * Villette ' end happily as she did the other 
books, because, while " the lovers in her other books 
were composite characters," having " no absolute 
originals in real life," Paul Emmanuel was too real to 
her to permit her imagination to wed him to Lucy 
Snowe, — in other words, herself. Mr. MacKay even 
lays her poems under an embargo to help the point. 
Where did she get that intimate knowledge of love? 
What was the "irresistible impulse"? 

One ought not to be compelled to say that it is not 
because Charlotte Bronte will sink in our esteem if we 
accept this as a solution, that we shrink from accept- 
ing it.^ On the contrary, as Mr. MacKay well points 
out, she will rise, if such a process is possible with 
one who already occupies the highest place there. 
It is not a question of shrinking. The simple fact 
is, the point is not proved. That she suffered this 
" total withdrawal of happiness " for two years, where- 
as, by returning to Haworth at the close of the first 
year, the happiness should, under ordinary circum- 
stances, have been restored, is, with all due respect, 
pettifogging. If her conscience was touched by 
leaving her father at such a time, knowing what a 
conscience it was, we may rest assured that the mere 

^ In her defence of Miss Bronte, Mrs. Terhune goes quite too far 
in speaking of this as a " malodorous scandal " [' Charlotte Bronte 
At Home.' By Marion Harland. G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York 
and London, 1899, p. 164], which it never was, even in the eyes 
of those who support the view here contested ; and she is altogether 
unjustified in her suggestion that M. Heger's part was that of "a 
gallant intriguant'' 



86 Charlotte Bronte 

fact of his reform upon her return would not quiet it. 
Kvery time she might think of it, it would prick her, 
no matter whether for one year or for ten. And this 
severe conscience would undoubtedly relieve itself in 
extravagant language to one who, like Mary Taylor, 
pointed out to her her plain duty. 

Of course she grieved at parting with Heger, her 
one kind and sympathetic friend at the pensionnat, 
for whom, undoubtedly, she had a warm affection. 
And of course Mme. Heger objected to her corre- 
spondence with him. For was it likely that the 
original of Mme. Beck would regard a correspondence 
with the original of Lucy Snowe with favor? As for 
the similarity of her heroes, that is because of her 
realism. She only affected what she had experienced. 
Her intellectual experience lay in Brussels, and was 
affected more by M. Heger than by any other man. 
It was a narrow experience: what more natural than 
that he should form a type for her, when she had so 
few originals to choose from? Much of her experi- 
ence in her formative period was spent in governess- 
ing; and the slavery of the life, and its hopelessly 
loveless social degradation, were burned into her 
consciousness. She could more easily fashion her 
imagination upon the unrequited loves of women in 
her position than upon any other theme. Without 
doubt, the peculiar unfitness of the Brontes for such a 
life made it more intolerable to them than to most 
girls forced by untoward circumstance to leave their 
homes. Often, indeed, the homes they go into are 
more comfortable than those they leave. ' But the 
social inequalities were made very prominent to 
Charlotte, and she is fairly entitled to ask the ques- 
tion : How can a great man like Rochester care for a 



Her Passion 87 

poor unknown nobody like mc, Jane Eyre? How 
can I, Louis Moore, a pauper and a dependant, hon- 
orably make love to a rich lady like Miss Keeldar? 
Does it follow, because she asked herself these 
questions, out of the depth of her experience in 
similar positions, that they are merely pale reflec- 
tions of an actual passion she once entertained for a 
married man in Brussels? The fact that he was 
married is a sufficient indication to me that she did 
not love him in this way, so long as there are no 
direct proofs to the contrary. 

And as for the " irresistible impulse," is not too 
much made of it? Do we not all of us suffer from 
irresistible impulses at times? — the impulse to leave 
a dull home for scenes of activity, for example? The 
impulse for change of scene is, in fact, one of the 
most irresistible in nature, and one which will over- 
ride conscience, common sense, and all the other 
virtues beginning with " C." 

It is so easy to find reasons in a writer's life to 
explain a writer's work ; and it is so particularly easy 
in Miss Bronte's case to read between the lines that 
we have fallen into the impertinent habit of reading 
into them. Let me offer a few intrinsic reasons on 
the contrary side. The acme of one stage of Lucy's 
sufferings is her visit to the confessional, of which 
much is made by the supporters of this hypothesis. 
But that occurred before her love for Paul Emmanuel 
had awakened. Again, why not attempt to deduce 
from her treatment of Dr. John that she was in love 
with his well-known original also, George Smith? 
Why were his letters so precious to Lucy? To be 
sure, she disclaims, " with the utmost scorn, every 
sneaking suspicion of what are called warmer feel- 



88 Charlotte Bronte 

ings," and says that women never entertain them 
when " to do so would be to commit a mortal absurd- 
ity." She admitted there was no hope in that case; 
yet there was all the more a struggle between the 
feelings and the reason (so keen was the struggle 
that she invariably capitalizes the powers, incarnating 
them like classic fates). It was his nature to be affec- 
tionate, she argues. He was to her what the necta- 
rine is to the bee that feeds on it. " Is the sweet-briar 
enamoured of the air?" This proves to her that he 
does not love her with a wooer's love ; but it does 
not prove that she does not love him : the most that 
it proves is that her sturdy reason will not allow her 
to indulge in any foolish hopes concerning it. She 
sums it up to Paulina thus: 

" I '11 tell you what I do, Paulina . . . I never see hifft. I 
looked at him twice or thrice about a year ago, before he 
recognized me, and then I shut my eyes ; and if he were 
to cross their balls twelve times between each day's sunset 
and sunrise, except from memory I should hardly know 
what shape had gone by. ... I mean that I value vision, 
and dread being struck stone blind." It was best to an- 
swer her strongly at once, and to silence forever the 
tender, passionate confidences which left her lips sweet 
honey, and sometimes dropped in my ear — molten lead. 

It is demonstrated that the barrier her reason — that 
deadly reason ! — erected between them would have 
been broken down had Dr. John manifested a lover's 
passion. So why not, I repeat, find in that history 
the history of Lucy Snowe's original? It seems to 
me quite as valid as the other. 

But why, in all seriousness, should we forget that 
Charlotte Bronte is a novelist? Because, more than 



Her Passion 89 

any other, she wrote herself and her friends into her 
fictions, they do not cease to be fictions. Her char- 
acter is there ; not necessarily every detail of her 
actual life. She was a lonely woman, thrice lonely at 
the time of this ' Villette ; ' and Lucy Snowe echoed the 
cry that went up from her desolate heart. I think every 
sympathetically observing man of middle age must 
number among his acquaintances many women who 
more or less vaguely convey the notion to his mas- 
culine understanding that there are locked up in their 
bosoms many sentimental confidences to which the 
key would not be hard to find. Charlotte Bronte had 
scornful words to utter on feminine outpourings such 
as these : 

As far as I knew them, the chance of a gossip about 
their usually trivial secrets, their often very washy and 
paltry feelings, was a treat not to be readily forgone. 

She was too reserved, too proud, too maidenly, to be 
guilty of such confidences herself; and her sentiment 
(which, because it was true and not false, because it 
was based on an ideal longing for real affection in a 
loveless environment, became to her a passion con- 
suming) went into what she thought was impersonal 
fiction; as a composer may throw into music what 
he would not talk of among his fellow-men. Her 
life was a vacuum, which passionate nature abhorring, 
sent its own passion into to fill. It is the passion of 
passion which breathes in ' Villette ; ' not the picture 
of any particular passion in her experience, but pas- 
sion's self. 

But might she not possibly have been in love with 
him? Why, certainly: just as she might possibly 
have entertained a hopeless passion for Louis Napo- 



90 Charlotte Bronte 

leon or the Prince Consort. I cheerfully confess my 
inability to read the secrets of her heart, and I take 
joy in that inability. 



Ill 

Why was she sad? No one who has read the 
biography need ever ask the question. Mrs. Gaskell 
has been charged by later writers with drawing too 
sombre a picture, but Mr. Shorter's book merely in- 
tensifies the gloom.i " Nothing happens at Haworth," 

1 It is the highest tribute to Mrs. Gaskell's work that so much of 
it stands after the winnowing of Mr. Shorter. The two books should 
be read together, Mr. Shorter completing what Mrs. Gaskell began ; 
and the student desirous of the facts of Miss Bronte's life need read 
none of the other biographies, except Sir Wemyss Reid's ; although 
the Bronte enthusiast will read them all. [He will take particular 
pleasure, also, in the article ' In The Early Forties,' by Sir George 
Murray Smith, in the Critic for January, 1901. It is like a voice from 
the tombs to hear the Dr. John of ' Villette ' tell his reminiscences 
at this late date.] Mr. Shorter's individual book and his annota- 
tions of Mrs. Gaskell's 'Life' are invaluable additions to the sub- 
ject : his conscientiously gathered collection of letters, added to those 
published by Mrs. Gaskell, and in some places correcting them, throws 
the fullest light on the life of the Brontes. Mrs. Gaskell's mistakes 
of fact were not so many as were her errors of judgment in writing 
too frankly of the living ; and the book is one of the best proofs ex- 
tant of the impossibility of a final biography written at a near period 
to the death of the subject. The solitary advantage of writing at 
such a period is that valuable impressions vivid then, and facts re- 
membered then, may pass away and be forgotten later. The only 
remedy would seem to be to write soon after death, and to put away 
the writing until such time as the future will permit for the rectifi- 
cation of the inevitable errors and the publication of the proved 
facts. 

Mrs. Gaskell's book was resented in Yorkshire as an unfriendly 
picture from a Lancashire standpoint. Yet her object was merely to 
show that Charlotte herself held the same views; that certain of her 
Yorkshire characters were but exemplifications of the Yorkshire say- 
ing which Miss Bronte quoted her : " Keep a stone in thy pocket seven 



Her Passion 91 

writes Charlotte, " nothing at least of a pleasant 
kind." ^ The only happiness there ever was in the 
Haworth vicarage was in the early days. The loneli- 
ness of the physical surroundings, the constraint im- 
posed upon a willing affection by an unsympathetic 
father, the torments of a brother's depravity, then 
loneliness once more — the utter loneliness of death. 

The purpose in going to Brussels was to fit her for 
the management of a school. When she had by 
conscientious painstaking so prepared herself, with 
Heger's diploma in her hands, stating that she was 
capable of teaching French and was proficient in the 
best methods of instruction for the conduct of a 
school, notwithstanding her great desire to carry out 
this plan, she is nevertheless called away from all these 
fruits of victory by duties at Haworth. "With the 
help of God, I will try to deny myself in this matter 
and to wait." That was, in itself, a sufficient reason 
for sorrow in the home-going. She was giving up a 
cherished scheme, and the " irresistible impulse " 
which drew her to Brussels against her conscience may 
very well have been the fervent desire to complete her 
course so that she could at once embark upon her life 
work, notwithstanding the ever-present conscious- 
ness that her father's weakness stood in the way of its 
consummation.^ 



year; turn it, and keep it seven year longer, that it may be ever ready 
to thine hand when thine enemy draws near" \j). 12]. Mary Taylor 
says the book is not so gloomy as the truth. ^Shorter, p. 22.^ 

1 Gaskell, p. 327. 

2 It was not teaching that wore her out. Jane Eyre finds pleasure 
in the school at Morton. Lucy Snowe declines Mr. Home's offer to 
treble the salary she receives from Mme. Beck if she will become 
the companion of his daughter. " I declined. I think I should have 
declined had I been poorer than I was, and with scantier fund of re- 



92 Charlotte Bronte 

There were other griefs at the time : Martha 
Taylor's death, Mary Taylor's going to New Zea- 
land, which was equivalent to death — but who shall 
explain all the causes for depression in sensitive 
human nature? Like all susceptible minds, hers had 
premonitions : her " conscience " was probably stirred 
by such. After her return, finding Bramwell in his 
sad plight, she writes : " When I left you I was 
strongly impressed with the feeling that I was going 
back to sorrow." ^ It has been sufficiently proved that 
Bramwell's fall had nothing to do with the tragic 
tone of his sister's life in Brussels. But it is merely 
a chronological point, after all : the fall occurred after 
the return to Havvorth, but before the writing of 
' Villette.' Her letters relating to Bramwell form an 
abundant evidence of its effect upon her, if any proof 
were necessary on such a subject. With one whose 
public writings were so closely a transcript of her 
private feelings, who can doubt that that fall added 
its tinge of sorrow to the gloom? That all the gloom, 
or, indeed, the major part of it, was due to this cause, 
we cannot think, for with all her melancholy, Char- 
lotte had a sturdy common-sense which could delib- 

source, more stinted narrowness of future prospect. I had not that 
vocation. I could teach ; I could give lessons ; but to be either a 
private governess or a companion was unnatural to me. Rather 
than fill the former post in any great house, I would have deliberately 
taken a housemaid's place, bought a strong pair of gloves, swept bed- 
rooms and staircases, and cleaned stoves and locks in peace and 
independence. Rather than be a companion, I would have made 
shirts and starved ... I was no bright lady's shadow." Compare 
this with the subtle analysis of her deficiencies in her letter to Mr. 
Williams of May 12, 1848. [^Shorter, pp- 375 -i-'?^'-] It was the de- 
pendent life of 2i governesi which appalled her, and for which she had 
the same hatred as Mary WoUstonecraft. 
1 Gaskell, p. 295. 



Her Passion 93 

erately put out of sight, though not without fearful 
vvrenchings, all that interfered with her convictions of 
right and wrong. The more yielding spirit of Anne 
was the most completely crushed by this spectacle, 
and in ' The Tenant of Wildfell Hall ' we have, so far 
as I know, the one instance in the literature of fic- 
tion of a book written in an intensely abhorrent 
mood, as a religious duty, — with not only no artis- 
tic satisfaction with the theme, but with an anguished 
shrinking from it. Not even Emily could have suc- 
ceeded under such genetic restraints, much less Anne 
with her sweet mediocrity. As for Charlotte, there 
is a mixture of disgust in her references to Bramwell, 
which saved her from the paralyzing influences his mis- 
conduct wrought upon the youngest of the sisters. 
What has become a basilisk to natures whose zeal is 
unchecked by discretion, the Ithuriel spear of stronger 
spirits transforms into its original shape.^ 

The Reverend Patrick Bronte, A. B.,^ was not alto- 
gether unlike that father of another famous woman 

1 See p. 51. 

2 The origin of the name has never been explained. " In the reg- 
ister of his birth his name is entered, as are the births of his brothers 
and sisters, as Brunty and Bruntee ; and it can scarcely be doubted, 
as Dr. Douglas Hyde has pointed out, the original name was 
O'Prunty." [Shorter, p. 29.] The name was variously spelled Brunty, 
Bruntee, Bronty, Branty. [^The Bronte Society's Publication, Ft. 
III.] Mr. Shorter's guess that the spelling 'Bronte' came with the 
dukedom of that name conferred upon Lord Nelson in 1799, 'S a 
clever one ; but although Miss Bronte knew of course the identity of 
the names, she refers to it as a mere accident. If her father, or some 
one else, had purposely conformed the spelling to Lord Nelson's 
title, I think she was ignorant of it. She appeared, indeed, to be 
singularly unconcerned about her ancestors, there being no reference 
to the subject in her correspondence. Mr. Bronte was doubtless 
struck by the high-sounding Greek name, suggesting perhaps ' Boa- 
nerges ' to his ministerial mind, and thenceforth adopted it. 



94 Charlotte Bronte 

who has recently been made better known to us. We 
may easily discount as unsubstantiated gossip some 
of the episodes which Mrs. Gaskell chronicles, with- 
out materially modifying our estimate of his charac- 
ter. ^ It is a little too much to ask us to believe, as 
Mr. Shorter does, that the old man's passions were 
thoroughly aroused " for once and for the only time 
in his life "2 when Mr. Nicholls asked him for his 
daughter's hand. I have a little sympathy with the 
grim old tyrant's contempt for the quaking curate, but 
no reasonable excuse can be offered for the violence 
of his outbreak. Such violence does not come late 
in life; it echoes former tempests. 

The children suffered from his idiosyncrasies, 
which are traceable, after the manner of idiosyn- 
crasies, to a general poverty of liberal knowledge on 
subjects the secrets of which are not far to seek for 
open-minded conscientiousness. Mr. Bronte's views 
on education, for example, were really a lack of views; 
and he strove in moments of active practice to atone 
for hours of neglect. Just how much of Mrs. Gas- 
kell's " gossip " Mr. Shorter would throw out is not 
evident; he would probably exclude the testimony of 
the nurse who tended Mrs. Bronte concerning the 
father's Spartan (or, considering both the vegetable 
and the man, should we say Irish?) prohibition of 
aught but potatoes for the children's dinner. But 
Miss Nussey supports it, and hers is the only author- 

1 Miss Nussey contributed an article to Scribner's for May, 187 1, 
which is an exceedingly interesting addition to Bronteana, and it has 
generally been overlooked. The origin of the pistol-firing stories 
may be found here. Miss Nussey says that every morning Mr. 
Bronte discharged the load which was entered the night before. See 
also Shorter's note to Gaskell, pp. 52 seq. 

- Shorter, p. 474. 



Her Passion 95 

itatlve voice on the subject. " For years," she says, 
" they had not tasted animal food." ^ Mary Taylor 
also writes that Charlotte never touched it at Roe 
Head.2 And we find it hard to forgive him for allow- 
ing Charlotte and Emily to return to Cowan's Bridge 
after the deaths of Maria and Elizabeth. The dry egoist 
was wrapped up in his invalid's seclusion ; and the 
all-sufficient proof of the want of sympathy between 
the children and their father is that their writing was 
done in secret, and divulged only when the knowl- 
edge could not longer be kept from him. 

But very little sympathy can be felt for such troubles 
of a man as arise from a too numerous progeny; and 
pious references to the authority of Scripture as to 
the blessedness of quiversful may safely be met by 
the equal authority of Psalm xvii. 14. A wife sacri- 
ficed to excessive motherhood is not a pleasant 
spectacle to contemplate.^ 

We have seen that his blindness was a cause of sor- 
rowful anxiety to Charlotte. We know with what 
dutiful obedience was borne his senseless opposition 
to her marriage. We know how tenderly his whims 
were humored and his wishes anticipated. And we 
may be certain that a part of the gloom is due to his 
cold privacy and uncertain temper. We see his 
reflection in Mr. Helstone.* 

1 Scribner's, May, 1871. 

2 Gaskell, p. 104. 

8 See ' Rousseau.' By John Morley, vol. i., pp. 124-125. 

* Mr. F. A. Leyland, in an elaborate two-volume work ['The Bronte 
Family. With special reference to Patrick Bramwell Bronte.' Lon- 
don : Hurst and Blackett, 18S6], has attempted the defence of both 
father and brother. In regard to Bramwell, as Mr. Birrell character- 
istically remarks, "he fails to interest those who, to employ an Ameri- 
can figure, ' have no use ' for that young man." He fails to interest 
because he fails to convince ; and the whole pitiful story had 



96 



Charlotte Bronte 



Our easy-jogging optimism, fostered by pleasant 
surroundings, and drawing its springs principally from 
the negative virtues, if not sometimes from the posi- 
tive vices, finds it not difficult to lay the charge of 
morbid fancies against those whom the stars in their 
courses seem to fight. There was much to foster such 
fancies in the life of Charlotte Bronte : the conditions 
were ripe for melancholy. She had, in the first place, 
that kind of constitutional ill-health which takes the 
backbone out of a certain kind of men, and makes of 
them a certain kind of saints. The physical condi- 
tions of a life, both past and present, must be taken 
into account in the summing up. The parsonage was 
undoubtedly very often too cold for health, to say 
nothing of comfort. Once she excuses the illegi- 
bility of her writing on the plea that her fingers 
are numb with cold ; ^ and much of the ill-health is 
undoubtedly traceable to the stone steps which the 
shivering family had to go up and down many times a 
day. Think of what a Yorkshire winter meant in 
such a house to children in whom inherited weakness 
only needed slight encouragement to develop into in- 
curable disease. Little wonder that the letters form a 
dark, continuous diary of bronchitis, toothache, loss of 
appetite, cold, coughs, consumption, death. 

That microscopical handwriting of the early years 

much better been left untold. All that the two volumes contain 
which is really a contribution to our knowledge of the subject could 
have been condensed into a short magazine article ; and the porten- 
tous bombast and effeminate fancy of the verses which have been 
here so painstakenly collected serve no other purpose than to empha- 
size the mean absurdity of the rumor that Bramwell, and not Emily, 
was the author of ' Wuthering Heights.' See also Mr. Francis H. 
Grundy's ' Pictures of the Past,' London, 1879. 
1 Shorter, p. 408. 



Her Passion 97 

must be taken into the account. Of those youthful 
productions thirty-six have come down to us, contain- 
ing about 700,000 words. That would make about 
seven large octavo books of ordinary type, of three 
hundred pages each. She crowded 35,000 words on 
eighteen pages ; which is equal to one hundred pages, 
ordinary type ! Every sufferer from overstrained 
eyesight will credit these performances with a good 
part of the ill-health which followed. 

They had no other children for playmates, and their 
influence upon one another was intensified by this 
cross-breeding of the family intellect, so to speak. 
There is no record of children's books in the family 
library, which, indeed, is to be reckoned an asset of 
happiness, when we recall what children's books were 
in that day. At the same time, knowing what they are 
in this day, and how they influence youthful minds, we 
can fancy what the lack meant. 

Her physical torments pursued her to the foreign 
city. The demon of cold, indeed, seemed fated to 
follow her wherever she went. She complains they 
have no fires in the pensionnat, ^ and says at another 
time : " During the bitter cold weather we had through 
February and the principal part of March, I did not 
regret that you had not accompanied me. If I had 
seen you shivering as I shivered myself, if I had 
seen your hands and feet as red and swelled as mine 
were, my discomfort would just have been doubled. 
I can do very well under this sort of thing; it does 
not fret me; it only makes me numb and silent; but if 
you were to pass a winter in Belgium, you would be 
ill."^ And while speaking of Brussels, it seems ap- 
propriate to mention the other drawbacks to her hap- 

1 Gaskell, p. 274. 2 /^,^ p, 262. 

7 



98 



Charlotte Bronte 



piness there, each of which added its weight to the 
sadness of ' Villette.' 

Emily was not with her on this second visit. When 
not occupied with her duties she was as absolutely 
alone as if she had been on a desert island. " I get 
on here from day to day in a Robinson-Crusoe-like 
sortof a way, very lonely, but that does not signify." ^ 
" Brussels is indeed desolate to me now. I am com- 
pletely alone. I cannot count the Belgians anything. 
It is a curious position to be so utterly solitary in the 
midst of numbers. Sometimes the solitude oppresses 
me to an excess. One day lately I felt as if I could 
bear it no longer. . . . One day is like another in this 
place. I know you, living in the country, can hardly 
believe it is possible life can be monotonous in the cen- 
tre of a brilliant capital like Brussels; but so it is. I 
feel it most on holidays, when all the girls and teach- 
ers go out to visit, and it sometimes happens that I am 
left during several hours quite alone, with four great 
desolate school-rooms at my disposition. I try to 
read, I try to write ; but in vain. I then wander about 
from room to room, but the silence and loneliness of 
all the house weighs down one's spirits like lead."^ 

The obtuseness and riotous disorder of her Belgian 
pupils were a sore trial to her spirit, and the Jesuit 
atmosphere was poison to her free English breath. 

The grandes vacances began soon . . . when she was left 
in a great deserted pensionnat, with only one teacher for a 
companion. This teacher, a Frenchwoman, had always 
been uncongenial to her; but, left to each other's sole 
companionship, Charlotte soon discovered that her asso- 
ciate was more profligate, more steeped in a kind of cold, 

1 Gaskell, p. 264. 2 /^._ p. 273. 



Her Passion gg 

systematic sensuality, than she had before imagined it pos- 
sible for a human being to be ; and her whole nature re- 
volted from this woman's society. A low nervous fever was 
gaining on Miss Bronte. She had never been a good sleeper, 
but now she could not sleep at all. Whatever had been 
disagreeable, or obnoxious, to her during the day, was 
presented when it was over, with exaggerated vividness to her 
disordered fancy. ... In the dead of the night, lying awake 
at the end of the long, deserted dormitory, in the vast and 
silent house, every fear respecting those whom she loved, 
and who were so far off in another country, became a ter- 
rible reality, oppressing her and choking up the very life 
blood in her heart. Those nights were times of sick, dreary, 
wakeful misery ; precursors of many such in after years. 

In the daytime, driven abroad by loathing of her com- 
panion and by the weak restlessness of fever, she tried to 
walk herself into such a state of bodily fatigue as would 
induce sleep. So she went out, and with weary steps would 
traverse the Boulevards and streets sometimes for hours 
together, faltering and resting occasionally on some of the 
many benches placed for the repose of happy groups, or for 
solitary wanderers like herself. Then up again — anywhere 
but to the pensionnat — out to the cemetery where Martha 
lay — out beyond it, to the hills whence there is nothing to 
be seen but fields as far as the horizon. The shades of 
evening made her retrace her footsteps — sick for want of 
food, but not hungry ; fatigued with long continued exercise 
— yet restless still, and doomed to another weary, haunted 
night of sleeplessness. She would thread the streets in the 
neighborhood of Rue d'Isabelle, and yet avoid it and its 
occupant, till as late an hour as she dared be out. At last, 
she was compelled to keep her bed for some days.^ 

From the letters she wrote from Brussels, and from 
' Villette,' we know that this is not exaggerated. The 
1 Gaskell, pp. 270 seg. 

LofC. 



loo Charlotte Bronte 

frightful monotony of her existence under these sur- 
roundings is surely sufficient to account for the per- 
vasive melancholy of the story, and the homesickness 
was of the acutest sort. 

But there was one consuming fire of pain in her 
life which in its biting fierceness was alone sufficient to 
lead her into the valley of the shadow; and that was 
the death of her sisters. Whatever of brightness, 
whatever of joy, whatever of the glad zest of existence 
there was in her career drew its inspiration from the 
sunshine of their companionship ; and when this was 
withdrawn there ensued that death-in-life which she 
has so deathlessly celebrated. Of Emily she writes : 
" You must look on and see her do what she is unfit 
to do, and not dare to say a word — a painful neces- 
sity for those to whom her health and existence are as 
precious as the life in their veins. When she is ill 
there seems to be no sunshine in the world for me. 
The tie of sister is near and dear indeed, and I think 
a certain harshness in her powerful and peculiar 
character only makes me cling to her more. . . . 
Above all, never allude to . . . the name Emily when 
you write to me." ^ "I hope still, for I imist hope — 
she is dear to me as life. If I let the faintness of 
despair reach my heart I shall become worthless."^ 
Then, when it was over: " Life has become very void, 
and hope has proved a strange traitor; when I shall 
be able again to put confidence in her suggestions, I 
know not: she kept whispering that Emily would 
not, could not die, and where is she now ? Out of 
my reach, out of my world — torn from me." ^ 

Upon her return from Anne's funeral, she writes : 
" I left Papa soon and went into the dining-room : I 
1 Shorter, p. 167. 2 73.^ p_ i^^, j 73.^ p. j^g. 



Her Passion loi 

shut the door — I tried to be glad that I was come 
home. I have always been glad before except once 

— even then I was cheered. But this time joy was 
not to be the sensation. I felt that the house was all 
silent — the rooms were all empty. I remembered 
where the three were laid — in what narrow, dark 
dwellings — nevermore to reappear on earth. So the 
sense of desolation and bitterness took possession of 
me. The agony that was to be undergone and was 
not to be avoided, came on. . . . The great trial is 
when evening closes and night approaches. At that 
hour we used to assemble in the dining-room — we 
used to talk. Now I sit by myself. . . . " ^ She 
knows that " Solitude, Remembrance, and Longing" 

— that trinity of grief — are to be her sole com- 
panions from that day on. 

Turn, now, to the novels: 

It flashes on me at this moment how sisters feel toward 
each other. Affection twined with their life, which no 
shocks of feeling can uproot, which little quarrels only 
trample an instant that it may spring more freshly when 
the pressure is removed ; affection that no passion can ulti- 
mately outrival, with which even love itself cannot do more 
than compete in force and truth. Love hurts us so : it is 
so tormenting, so racking, and it burns away our strength 
with its flame ; in affection there is no pain and no fire, only 
sustenance and balm. 

The sympathetic reader of Miss Bronte's novels 
can put his finger on the first passage written after 
the sharp agony of Emily's death, — so burned into 
the fibre of her being was its vital impress : 

1 Gaskell, p. 421. 



I02 Charlotte Bronte 

. . . she spent the night like Jacob at Peniel. Till break 
of day she wrestled with God in earnest prayer. Not 
always do those who dare such divine conflict prevail. Night 
after night the sweat of agony may burst dark on the fore- 
head ; the supplicant may cry for mercy with that soundless 
voice the soul utters when its appeal is to the Invisible 
" Spare my beloved," it may implore, " heal my life's life. 
Rend not from me what long affection entwines with my whole 
nature. God of heaven — bend — hear — be clement!" 
And after this cry and strife, the sun may rise and see him 
worsted. That opening morn, which used to salute him 
with the whisper of zephyrs, the carol of skylarks, may 
breathe as its first accents from the dear lips which color 
and heat have quitted : 

" Oh ! I have had a suffering night. This morning I am 
worse. I have tried to rise. I cannot. Dreams I am un- 
used to have troubled me." 

Then the watcher approaches the patient's pillow, and 
sees a new and strange moulding of the familiar features, 
feels at once that the insufferable moment draws nigh, knows 
that it is God's will that his idol shall be broken, and bends 
his head, and subdues his soul to the sentence he cannot 
avert and scarce can bear. 

As she confessed later, it was dreary work after that : 
the only persons in the world who understood her 
were no more. And how lonely the lonely moors ! 
how still the still house ! how much more like Death's 
self the symbols of death under the windows ! 

So, when the time for ' Villette ' came, it was com- 
posed in a lonehness which cast long shadows across 
the page, " I have sometimes desponded and some- 
times despaired because there was none to whom to 
read a line, or of whom to ask a counsel. ' Jane 
Eyre ' was not written under such circumstances, nor 



Her Passion 103 

were two-thirds of ' Shirley.' I got so miserable 
about it, I could bear no allusion to the book." ^ 
" I am now again at home," she writes Mr. Williams. 
" I call it home still, much as London would be called 
London if an earthquake would shake its streets to 
ruins." ^ "I used rather to like Solitude," she makes 
Moore write, " to fancy her a somewhat quiet and 
serious, yet fair nymph ; an Oread descending to me 
from lone mountain-passes; something of the blue 
mist of hills in her array, and of their chill breeze in 
her breath — but much also of their solemn beauty in 
her mien. . . . Since that day I called S. to me in the 
school-room . . . since that hour I abhor Solitude. 
Cold abstraction — fleshless skeleton — daughter — 
mother — and mate of Death!" That came from^ 
Charlotte's heart of hearts. Here was a love that went 
down so deep that its roots got entangled in the deeper 
ones of friendship. 

With the possibilities of ultimate utter helplessness 
before them, in the event of the father's death, his 
narrow stipend ceasing with his allotted time on earth, 
we can easily imagine the desolate images of the 
future called up by his continuous ill-health in that 
home which was the scene of so many noble endeav- 
ors. For, notwithstanding the spiritual barrenness of 
old Bronte, and the congenital dissimilarity between 
father and daughters, Charlotte's dutiful care of him 
provided an escape from intolerable tedium ; and what 
would have become of her had he died before her? 
And so we have, as flowing from her, not dreary 
experiences only, but still more dreary anticipations, 
the sadly realistic picture of the unmated which read- 
ers of these novels will not soon forget. The pathetic 
1 Gaskell, p. 592. a Shorter, p. 201. 



I04 Charlotte Bronte 

portraits of Miss Mann and Miss Ainley are what she 
sees the future has in store for her. It is not the 
dread of being a single woman, but of being a lonely 
woman, all her life, that thrills her with mournful mus- 
ings, and discloses heart-burning disquietudes. After 
she feels that she is safe from the worst features of a 
solitary existence, she can write : 

Lonely as I am, how should I be if Providence had never 
given me courage to adopt a career — perseverance to plead 
through two long weary years with publishers till they ad- 
mitted me ? How should I be, with youth past, sisters lost, 
a resident in a moorland parish where there is not a single 
educated family? In that case I should have had no world 
at all : the raven, weary of surveying the deluge, and without 
an ark to return to, would be my type. As it is, something 
like a hope and motive sustains me still.* 

But the raven came very near to her, notwithstanding. 
Well did Mrs. Gaskell choose, in selecting a motto for 
her fly-leaf, that cry of Aurora Leigh, — 

Oh, my God, 
. . . Thou hast knowledge, only Thou, 
How dreary 't is for women to sit still 
On winter nights by solitary fires, 
And hear the nations praising them far off. 

Now, these things being so, is it necessary to hunt 
for a particular love experience in Brussels to account 
for the particular love story in ' Villette ' ? May not the 
outward and visible signs of a known, be made, after 
the manner of symbols, to hide and mystify the in- 
ward and spiritual graces of an unknown, personality? 
The immense loneliness of a spirit, tossed and pounded 
on the rocks by tumultuous grief, cried out in the 

1 Shorter, p. 395. 



Her Passion 105 

night-time of its desolation, — cried out from her bed, 
her *' miserable bed, haunted with quick scorpions," 
— cried, and "with no language but a cry," for the 
natural life, which is the reverse of loneliness and 
wreckage, — the blessed life of a home where love is, 
and her divine handmaidens. 



IV 

This, joined to her unworldliness, is, I believe, the 
chief cause of the absence of wit in her novels. Suf- 
fering is sometimes the mother of wit, as with Heine; 
but with the more spiritual sort its bitterness does not 
warp the mind into aphorism. In the old original sense 
of " Wisdom " Charlotte Bronte had wit, for that is the 
clearest mark of elemental genius; but her passion 
was too deep and her life too unspotted from the 
world, — too simple, in a word, to admit the worldly 
wisdom which we generally mean by " wit." There is 
a grim humor in some of her characterizations (as 
in Miss Ainley's attitude towards the curates, as if 
they were " sucking saints," in contrast with her own 
experimental knowledge to the contrary) ; but she 
could not work up humorous situations. Think what 
Jane Austen would have made out of the encounter of 
Donne with the dog Tartar ! There is the gross ma- 
terial of humor, rather than the mined product. She 
had the capacity to realize, not the power to develop, 
— the sense, not the expression. The white light of 
her passion fills the room : we cannot distinguish the 
furniture. 

I have referred to Miss Bronte's delineations of 
children under the head of her realism. There is 
another reason why they failed. The child pictures 



io6 Charlotte Bronte 

are, no doubt, truthful, unless her intensity unwit- 
tingly deepened the colors, as intensity is liable to 
do. Her favorite characters, like herself, have a 
capacity for suffering, and she probably read some 
of the feeling of her own young life into Polly's, 
making it supersensitive beyond the limits of com- 
mon experience. It was not love for children that 
made her tender of Georgette, nor was it latent 
motherhood : it was not the child she loved, but 
Love. It was a drop of water, and she was dying 
of thirst. 

The truth is, children and animals (they go to- 
gether) did not enjoy a natural place in her thought. 
She had to individualize too sharply or to pass by 
too carelessly; and, although her conscience would 
not allow any slipshod work, from this painful lack 
of vital concern there results either a too particular 
emphasis or a too hazy view. Contrast her descrip- 
tion of Paul Emmanuel's dog — 

He . . . gave many an endearing word to a small span- 
ieless (if one may coin such a word) that nominally belonged 
to the house, but virtually owned him as master, being 
fonder of him than of any inmate. A delicate, silky, loving, 
and lovable little doggie she was, trotting at his side, look- 
ing with expressive attached eyes into his face ; and when- 
ever he dropped his bonnet-grec, or his handkerchief, 
which he occasionally did in play, crouching beside it with 
the air of a miniature lion guarding a kingdom's flag — 

with the picture of another bachelor's dog, Bartle 
Masset's Vixen, in ' Adam Bede * : 

The moment he appeared at the kitchen door with the 
candle in his hand, a faint whimpering began in the chim- 



Her Passion 107 

ney corner, and a brown-and-tan-colored bitch, of that 
wise-looking breed with short legs and long body, known 
to an unmechanical generation as turnspits, came creeping 
along the floor, wagging her tail, and hesitating at every 
other step, as if her affections were painfully divided be- 
tween the hamper in the chimney corner and the master, 
whom she could not leave without a greeting. 

"Well, Vixen, well then, how are the babbies?" said 
the schoolmaster, making haste towards the chimney cor- 
ner, and holding the candle over the low hamper, where 
two extremely blind puppies lifted up their heads towards 
the light, from a nest of flannel and wool. Vixen could 
not even see her master look at them without painful ex- 
citement : she got into the hamper and got out again the 
next moment, and behaved with true feminine folly, though 
looking all the while as wise as a dwarf with a large old- 
fashioned head and body on the most abbreviated legs. 

See how George Eliot vitalizes such scenes, — George 
Eliot, who, by the way, would never have employed 
the word " spanieless." It is not more than pretty 
as it stands in Charlotte Bronte : George Eliot would 
have made it beautiful. 

It may seem a small matter, but it points a moral. 
For the absence of a quality frequently means the 
engrossing presence of some other quality. Miss 
Bronte could give only a troubled attention to the 
httle comforts and enjoyments, the straggling sun- 
shine in the corners of a life, the joys of minor pos- 
sessions, and the pleasures of that abundant existence 
surrounding all mankind. She was absorbed in a 
large passion which consumed the thought which 
might otherwise have been given to details. 

She never posed the passion; it was hidden under 
the mantle of fiction. There was no hysterical diary 



io8 Charlotte Bronte 

for the literary executor to exploit. She was the 
very opposite order of being from Marie Bashkirtsefif, 
for whose outpourings she would have expressed un- 
mitigated scorn. But she suffered all the more for 
the penting up. 

V 

'Wuthering Heights ' is an absolutely unique book. 
Charlotte has been denominated, though foolishly, the 
foundress of the " governess novel." It is quite im- 
possible to fit Emily into a class. In the ' Professor,' 
although the narrator is seemingly of the male, we 
know, before we have turned a dozen pages, that the 
author is of the female, gender. Not so in * Wuth- 
ering Heights,' where even the oaths are men's oaths 
in the mouths of men.^ Crimsworth's " My God's " 
do not fool us for a moment, and the attempt at what 
she doubtless fancied distinctly male imagery, as 
when she makes the professor repulse Hypochondria 
" as one would a dreaded and ghastly concubine com- 
ing to embitter a husband's heart towards his young 
bride," are amusing failures. It was an almost super- 
human task, indeed, for a woman like Charlotte Bronte 
to portray in the first person her idea of masculine 
power, the unconscious subtle essence of her woman- 
hood almost of necessity changing the value of the 
paints. The result is, as I have suggested before, an 

^ There are many instances of women authors sinking their iden- 
tity so successfully as to completely baffle the investigator of sex ; 
but I know of only one instance where a male author has metamor- 
phosed himself into the female narrator of his story with such con- 
summate charm as to cause the reader to rub his eyes and ask if it 
be possible that a man could have written thus. I refer to the ' Sir 
Percival ' of Mr. Shorthouse. 



Her Passion IC9 

evidence of her genius ; for with a lesser writer the 
altered values would have negatived the portrait into 
colorlessness : with her, the genius burnt through the 
crudities, and merely heightened the colors beyond 
their proper tones.^ 

Emily's masterpiece is without type, and yet it 
swells with form. It is pure insight, of imagination 
all compact; and its revelation is of the lightning's 
flash. It sweeps like a tornado, it burns like a 
sirocco. To this wonderful vestal, as icy pure as 
Artemis, came the most terrible vision of mortal love 
ever vouchsafed to human genius. In all likelihood 
she knew nothing of Goethe's "elective affinities; " 
yet here they are in this marvellous book. Just as 
in nature a power inherent in atoms will cause two 
of differing natures to rush together to form a new 
combination, so in human nature do the spirits " rush 
together " by the compulsion of a similar mysterious 
force. That is Love, glittering, transcendent ; and it 
is not the chemical purity of the idea which makes 
' Wuthering Heights ' a dreaded book, that being 
more or less dimly recognized in all truly noble love 
stories ; but it is, besides the dazzling conception of 
this analogy, — dazzling things being painful things, 
— the milieu which offends. Had the dramatis per- 
sonce been of the familiar types, the " elective affini- 
ties " would have accomplished their predestined 
ends without any jar or smoke. But precisely be- 

1 I feel that it is a little unfair to criticise the ' Professor,' as Miss 
Bronte did not authorize its publication. We have it, however, and 
no Bronte lover is other than glad, for, notwithstanding its evident 
mistakes, it contains some of Currer Bell's best work. Nay, its errors 
emphasize the growth of her powers, as seen in the subsequent vol- 
umes. The chief error is due to this attempt at emptying herself into 
a male consciousness, — an impossible feat for such a woman. 



iio Charlotte Bronte 

cause that is a common occurrence, it behooved this 
terrible virgin to set the atoms free in an opposing 
atmosphere, to show inevitable passion clashing 
against inevitable fate, and on characters the most 
unfitted to control their natures torn by the con- 
flicting powers.^ 

The wildest Yorkshire gapes in the story; the at- 
mosphere is of the unconquerable moors : but Heath- 
cliff and Catherine are not of that or any other special 
earth, but of the universal. The reason for not 
marrying Heathcliff is given in Catherine's statement 
of this strongly felt " affinity " : 

" I 've no more business to marry Edgar Linton than I 
have to be in heaven ; and if the wicked man in there had 
not brought Heathcliff so low, I should n't have thought of 
it. It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now ; so he 
shall never know how I love him ; and that, not because he 's 
handsome, Nelly, but because he 's more myself than I am. 
Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same ; 
and Linton's is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, 
or frost from fire." 

It is her purpose to make this very clear. 

" I cannot express it : but surely you and everybody have 
a notion that there is or should be an existence of yours 
beyond you. What were the use of my creation if I were 

1 The nearest approach to such a " possession " by the " affinities " 
since Miss Bronte's day that I have met with is Mr. Phillips' passage 
in ' Paola and Francesca ' : 

"O God, Thou seest Thy creatures bound 
Together by that law which holds the stars 
In palpitating cosmic passion bright ; 
By which the very sun enthrals the earth, 
And all the waves of the world faint to the moon. 
Even by such attraction we two rush 
Together through the everlasting years." 



Her Passion 1 1 1 

entirely contained here ? My great miseries in this world 
have been Heathcliff 's miseries, and I watched and felt each 
from the beginning : my great thought in living is himself. 
If all else perished and he remained, /should still continue 
to be ; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the 
universe would turn to a mighty stranger : I should not seem 
a part of it. My love for Linton is like the foliage in the 
woods : time will change it, I 'm well aware, as winter 
changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the 
eternal rocks beneath : a source of little visible delight, but 
necessary. Nelly, I ain Heathcliff ! He 's always, always 
in my mind ; not as a pleasure, any more than I am always 
a pleasure to myself, but as my own being." 

Love is not really blind. If it does not seem to see 
faults, it is because it sees through them. Catherine 
knew Heathcliff's faults well enough, and with the 
usual Bronte genius, her creator avoided that error 
of minor writers, of covering a lover's perceptions as 
with a mantle, presumably on the theory that love is 
a form of insanity. There is insanity galore, one 
might say, in the wild talk of the people of ' Wuther- 
ing Heights;' but they never commit the supreme 
folly of confusing love with ideality. Catherine knows 
that Heathcliff is the reverse of anything good, and 
she warns the infatuated Isabella against him. 

"I wouldn't be you for a kingdom, then!" Catherine 
declared empathically ; and she seemed to speak sincerely. 
" Nelly, help me to convince her of her madness. Tell her 
what Heathcliff is : an unreclaimed creature, without refine- 
ment, without cultivation : an arid wilderness of furze and 
whinstone. I 'd as soon put that little canary into the park 
on a winter's day, as recommend you to bestow your heart 
on him ! It is deplorable ignorance of his character, child, 



1 1 2 Charlotte Bronte 

and nothing else, which makes that dream enter your head. 
Pray don't imagine that he conceals depths of benevolence 
and affection beneath a stern exterior ! He 's not a rough 
diamond — a pearl-containing oyster of a rustic: he's a 
fierce, pitiless, wolfish man. I never say to him, ' Let this 
or that enemy alone, because it would be ungenerous or cruel 
to harm them ; ' I say, * Let them alone, because / should 
hate them to be wronged ; ' and he 'd crush you like a 
sparrow's egg, Isabella, if he found you a troublesome 
charge. I know he could n't love a Linton ; and yet he 'd 
be quite capable of marrying your fortune and expectations : 
avarice is growing with him a besetting sin. There 's my 
picture : and I 'm his friend — so much so that, had he 
thought seriously to catch you, I should perhaps have held 
my tongue and let you fall into his trap." 

This was not jealousy, but downright friendliness 
and truthfulness, and the good Mrs. Dean confirms 
it, — not that it needs confirmation to any who read 
Heathcliff's history. 

But the point is that, notwithstanding all this 
damnatory evidence, she loves him, and he, her. 
It is a pure love, too, and there lies the wonder of it, 
— a chemically pure passion. It is not the love of 
the classics, for that was passion of the baser sort, and 
impure. There is, on the contrary, no plotting, no 
contrivance of lust, in the design. The affinities 
clash, and the horrid turmoil of the book is the 
noise of the clashing; but why do they clash? Be- 
cause they meet moral law. They dash against it as 
the sea against a rock-bound coast; but the coast is 
safe. The story is thus no picture of immorality, 
using that word in its customary narrow sense : were 
it merely that, it would not have its supreme claim 
upon our consideration. 



Her Passion 1 1 3 

On the other hand, it is not Christian love, either, 
for it cannot be used by way of illustrating the 
thirteenth chapter of the First Epistle to the Corin- 
thians. The idea of Christian knighthood — 

I could not love thee, dear, so much 
Loved I not honor more — 

is necessarily absent. It is love, neither pagan nor 
Christian; simply the chemical situation in its direct 
form, common in all ages and creeds. It is the essence 
of love — love in esse — but not love refined by Chris- 
tianity ; the mother liquor, not the developed potency. 
It is not immoral, but un-moral; not anti-Christian, 
simply non-Christian. Pagan love is really not love at 
all ; Christian love is love clarified. This is love's sub- 
stance, fulfilling essential laws. It is pure passion, not 
passionate impurity, — a new thing, not to be found 
in Shakspere, and a great and immortal conception. 

The book has caused grave misgivings, and even 
Charlotte, in her beautiful preface, doubts its tendency. 
Ought such books to be written? it is asked. Ought 
it to thunder and lighten? No, they ought not to be 
written except by Emily Brontes. The like of it 
never was, is not, and never will be until a new Emily 
Bronte appears. Until then we need have no anxie- 
ties, for neither the class that gloats over d'Abruzzio 
nor the class that gapes over Marie Corelli will ever 
be attracted by it. 

The author extends the picture beyond death. 
Catherine, dying, believes that when Heathcliff suffers 
she will suffer, too, he on the earth, she under ground. 
Heathcliff was in her soul ; and his torture following 
is because of this separation. Yet the revelation 
made to him after her death proves that her spirit 



1 1 4 Charlotte Bronte 

lingers still on the earth awaiting his, that they may- 
depart together, even as their bodies will melt into 
one in the one grave which he has ordered. This 
teasing presence, driving Heathcliff mad because of 
its insubstantiability, may not be a comforting thought 
to the reader, but it is better than Catherine's of 
suffering in the grave ; and as it comes as a revela- 
tion to the man after, as if to contradict that belief of 
the woman before, death, it may stand as the final 
earthly stage in the history of the "affinities."^ 

Charlotte had this thought of possession, too ; it is 
a part of the family inspiration ; it is a gleam of genius, 
inexplicable, heaven-sent. " Nelly, I am Heathcliff! " 
It is the apotheosis of passion ; and the passion 
is not as it is vulgarly conceived, — not in its 
popular secondary sense, — but is the apotheosis of 
law. The law has its fullest play in the hardest of 
circumstances : hence the passion, which means 
suffering. 

That is not all. The statement often made that 
there is no gleam of light in this dark book, nothing 
but gloom and despair, — no heaven above its hell, — 
is carelessly wrong. The awakening of a rational 
affection between the younger Catherine and Hareton, 
as the story closes, is all the more beautiful because 
of the preceding horrors. Emily's genius was not in 
the least like Poe's or Hoffmann's ; its nearest relative, 
out of her own family, in literature, is Hawthorne. 
There was no delight in her working over the horrors ; 

1 Mrs. Ward, in her brilliant introduction to ' Wuthering Heights,' 
traces its " horrors " to German Romantic influences. It may be so, in 
part. Yet there is the same essential difference between Emily and 
Hoffmann that there is between Charlotte and George Sand ; and the 
mystery of the primal power of each sister is left unsolved by the 
discussion, which covers rather accidents than fundamentals. 



Her Passion 1 1 5 

their depiction was not a Inir dc force. They were 
simply the result of the conflict of the warring powers 
in her theme. They did not exist of or for them- 
selves. And although the intensity of their portrayal 
causes them to remain in the memory after other 
things are forgotten, we should remember, too, that 
Heathcliff 's hate against the Earnshaws is in the end 
defeated by this same love which has haunted him 
throughout the years. " It will be odd if I thwart my- 
self," he muttered ; " but when I look for his father 
in his face, I find Jier every day more." The close 
of the book is the Victory of Love. Heathcliff saw 
in that love a fresh picture of his own, and dies with 
it on his vision. He dies in a strange, weird happi- 
ness ; and the peaceful sunset presages a beautiful 
dawn for those who remain.^ 

^ The author of ' Wuthering Heights ' is remembered also because 
of those valiant lines which ring yet their iron cadences : 

No coward soul is mine, 
No trembler in the world's storm-troubled sphere. 



Vain are the thousand creeds 
That move men's hearts : unutterably vain ; 

Worthless as withered weeds 
Or idlest froth amid the boundless main. 

There is not room for Death 
Nor atom that his might could render void; 

Thou — THOU art Being and Breath, 
And what Thou art may never be destroyed. 

Some of Anne's verses may be found in old-fashioned " Evangelical " 
hymnals. Charlotte's are forgotten. It is strange that one possessed 
of such a lyrical gift should not have naturally taken to its supreme 
form ; but so it was. Emily was the only poet in the family. 

Mr. Bronte's account of the answers of the children to his test 
questions at a time when Emily was not over five years old, fits in 
with the character as we know it later. The question put to her was 
what the father should do with Bramwell when he was naughty, and 
her answer was : " Reason with him, and when he won't listen to 
reason, whip him." [Gaskell, p. 59.] " She should have been a 



1 1 6 Charlotte Bronte 

" Nelly, I ain Heathcliff." I have said that Char- 
lotte had this sense of possession also, and I take it, 
as exemplified in both the sisters, to be a spark of the 
vital fire. Observe how often Charlotte uses the 
word " suit" in this complementary sense of chemical 
force. In * Shirley ' alone it occurs at least a dozen 
times. Louis Moore notes that Caroline would suit 
Robert with her lamb-like ways ; his wife must have 
something of the leopardess in her. Of Shirley he 
thinks : " If I were king, and she the house-maid that 
swept my palace stairs, across all that space be- 
tween us my eye would recognize her qualities ; a 
true pulse would beat for her in my heart, though an 
unspanned gulf made acquaintance impossible." " It 
delights my eye to look on her : she suits me," is the 
summing up. Even to serve a passing whim the 
word ministers to the same idea. When Martin 
ruminates over his proposed adventure with Caroline, 
he finds its justification thus : " If she behaves well 
and continues to suit me, as she has suited me to-day, 
I may do her a good turn." Again : " Well did Mr. 
Yorke like to have power and use it: he had now 
between his hands power over a fellow-creature's life : 
it suited him." Louis Moore, in writing down the 
scene of his proposal, says that Shirley bade him rise 
from his knees. " I obeyed : it would not have 
suited me to retain that attitude long." Robert com- 
forts Caroline with the assurance that he feels that 
his mother-in-law and he will suit. \^o\x\s feels Shirley 

man, a great navigator," said M. Heger. She was a great navigator, 
and only a girl. To think she scarcely received a word of praise for 
this I Sydney Dobell's, as I have said, was the first. But it came 
after the moors had ceased to weave their magic webs over their 
virgin slave. And oh, the pity of it, my brothers ! 

No coward soul -was thine, thou bright, brave Vestal of the moors ! 



Her Passion 117 

" in every sentient atom of his frame." That is the 
crowning glory of the love of Rochester and Jane. 
" You are my sympathy," he says. " My bride is 
here," he says, " because my equal is here and my 
likeness." "Jane suits me: do I suit her?" he asks. 
" To the finest fibre of my nature. Sir." That is one 
of the subtlest passages in English literature. The 
eight words are an octave of perpetual delight, for 
they peal ever joyous, ever true, to the inward sense 
of the Eternal Fitness. 



VI 

Her religious faith stands half-way between the 
independence of Emily and the piety of Anne. She 
conformed more to the ecclesiastical requirements 
and traditions than Emily, who would not teach in 
the Sunday-school ; but hers was not that perfect 
peace which passeth understanding, and under whose 
mantle the gentle Anne rested. Emily bore her fate 
with fortitude; Anne, hers with resignation; Char- 
lotte, hers with a mixture of the two. Emily was 
unflinching, Anne was patient, Charlotte was both. 
Christianity did not possess her as it did Anne; on 
the other hand, she was not defiant, like Emily. I 
do not think she found much comfort in her religion, 
for the Anglican faith of her day was of a somewhat 
barren substance. She did not, at least, get the com- 
fort out of it which Eugenie de Guerin got out of her 
faith, although the outward conditions of their lives 
were somewhat similar. The " Evangelical Counsels " 
are not prominently preached in " Evangelical " cir- 
cles ; and the Frenchwoman found in objective " good 
works " a vent for subjective distress. 



1 1 8 Charlotte Bronte 

But Miss Bronte was not really " Evangelical " in 
the partisan sense. She confesses, in ' Villette,' that 
she sees no essential difference between Lutheranism, 
Presbyterianism, and Episcopacy; and neither did 
the judicious Hooker, for that matter. "I smile at 
you again," she writes, — 

I smile at you again for supposing that I could be an- 
noyed by what you say respecting your religious and philo- 
sophical views ; that I could blame you for not being able, 
when you look amongst sects and creeds, to discover any 
one which you can exclusively and implicitly adopt as yours. 
I perceive myself that some light falls on earth from heaven 
— that some rays from the shrine of truth pierce the dark- 
ness of this life and world, but they are few, faint, and 
scattered, and who without presumption can assert that he 
has found the only true path upwards ? ^ 

Lucy Snowe had no desire to turn Paul Emmanuel 
from the faith of his fathers, although we know what 
she thought of that faith : " I thought Romanism 
wrong, a great mixed image of gold and clay ; but it 
seemed to me that tJiis Romanist held the purer 
elements of his creed with an innocency of heart 
which God must love." 

Such an honest-thinking woman could not assume 
an air of dilettante coquetry with such phases of belief 
as appeal to the sesthetic rather than the rational facul- 
ties. The splendor of Rome did not dazzle those 
clear eyes. She was not impervious to the incense; 
but she saw the loose morality, the conniving at lies, 
the net of involved spiritual complexities, on the other 
side of it all. She was not narrowly prejudiced 
against the Roman Catholic religion ; but the Anglo- 

1 Shorter, p. 389. 



Her Passion 1 1 9 

Saxon in her revolted against the maudlin elements 
of that faith which were evident to her; and she could 
not reconcile the indirect and sometimes dishonest 
means employed to bring about desirably good re- 
sults, with her inherited and instinctive open, honest, 
and direct methods. It was not so much a hatred as 
it was a contempt for what seemed to her Yorkshire 
independence blank idolatry. " They are at their 
idolatrous mcsse" she writes. The resounding glory 
oiseairiis jiidicat orbis terraruvi, which awoke convert- 
ing echoes in Newman's heart, was as a tinkling 
cymbal in her ear, — the " circle of the earth " being 
construed in her tongue into " the ruddy old lady of 
the seven hills." 

Yet she was no partisan of a persecuting sect, going 
about with its detestable Procrustean furniture. Her 
fancy was free enough to make grave heads shake on 
orthodox shoulders. She did not take everything on 
faith. She makes Shirley charmingly non-committal 
on the vexed subject of the Athanasian creed, and 
she condemns this symbol, in propria persona as, " pro- 
fane." 1 That her dislike of Rome is not an exclusive 
prejudice is shown by the similarity she makes Lucy 
Snowe discover between the little book which Paul 
Emmanuel has put in her desk for her spiritual com- 
fort and " certain Wesleyan Methodist tracts I had 
once read when a child ; they were flavored with 
about the same seasoning of excitation to fanaticism." 
She judged the religion by the lives of the people 
who professed it, having the highest authority for the 
application of the test. Unfortunately, this condemns 
the Protestants, too. 

Charlotte had plenty of that most uncommon sense 

1 Shorter, p. 407. 



120 Charlotte Bronte 

known as common. Emily obstinately refused all 
medicines, as though they interfered with her friend, 
Nature. Charlotte was willing to try homoeopathy, to 
save her sister's life. Emily rejected society; Char- 
lotte submitted to its tortures. There was, too, as a 
beautiful adjunct to this (and, indeed I think, it is 
naturally joined to a true common-sense) a simple- 
mindedness which a careless reader of her life might 
not apply to her. 

No one will gather, I hope, from what I have said 
on this subject, that Miss Bronte was not what is 
usually called " an earnest Christian," for that would 
be doing an injustice to a conscientious follower of 
right paths as construed in the pre-eminently Christian 
sense. Truly, she has the intense feminine idea of 
what the right path is : " The right path is that which 
necessitates the greatest sacrifice of self-interest, which 
implies the greatest good to others." ^ The cautious 
male moralist, while applauding the last half of this 
definition, would amend the first half by inserting the 
■word " sometimes," for he would be bound to acknowl- 
edge that certain self-interests may accomplish more 
good than their sacrifice. 

She passionately held that domestic endearments 
are the best things in the world. Her piety was suffi- 
ciently " orthodox," but was not of the kind which 
blinds either the level gaze of common-sense or the 
pure sight of other than heavenly visions, — unless the 
visions of a home where love is are also heavenly. 
The arguments of St. John with Jane are of the family 
group of Romney Leigh's with Aurora, — the theme of 
the poem, the general pressure of social work (called 
forth by the bitter need of it) against the individ- 
1 Gaskell, p. 312. 



Her Passion I2i 

ualistic urgency of a separative art, taking on more 
familiar features in Miss Bronte's hands, in that it sets 
forth the call on the faithful to sacrifice themselves for 
foreign missions, as opposed to the clear voice of the 
heart to stay at home. For " art," with Charlotte 
Bronte, read " heart." Rochester was still in England : 
foreign missions will remain foreign to her. 

Resignation is what she teaches ; but resignation 
is a very different thing from Content. What we 
long for with anguished yearnings, in the " undis- 
covered country," is Content, which, on earth, under 
the name of Resignation, is merely a negative vir- 
tue too often, to which, with hopes blighted and 
passions crushed, we cling with despair and not with 
patience. But to satisfy, there must be more than 
this : Content must be a thrilling force, a hfe-giving 
power. Then, indeed, " Contentment will be great 
riches." Resignation represents the pathetic side of 
Receptivity, and Miss Bronte's attitude towards it is 
peculiarly feminine. Here again the weather symphony 
chimes in with the moral quality. She tells us in ' Vil- 
lette,' that she fears a high wind because that de- 
mands a painful exertion of strength, " but the sullen 
downfall, the thick descent of snow, or dark rush of 
rain ask only resignation." ^ 

This resignation is the nearest she can attain on 
earth to the heavenly content. She is its prose-poet. 
The crucial struggles of her heroines are due to the 
ever-present conflict with temptation, as Christianly 
conceived. And her Christianity makes them trium- 

1 In a letter from Anne, published in Hours at Home, August, 1870, 
Emily's views on a prevailing east wind are recorded : " Emily con- 
siders it a very uninteresting wind." Note the personal touch, as 
if the wind were a neighbor dropped in from Keighley. 



122 Charlotte Bronte 

phant. Only, not with peace. She makes her fictional 
self cry out : " From my youth up Thy terrors have 
I suffered with a troubled mind." But she holds in 
check all rebellious feelings, and the passion is deep 
because of the restraint. Only, not with peace ! There 
would be less resignation if there was more peace. 
All the more credit, then, to the valiance of the 
struggler. 

But when she rises above all mists of earth, when 
her wing flashes in the blue, skirting the dizzy heights, 
we see the heavens opened and hear the heart-beat of 
the stars. 

This hag, this Reason, would not let me look up, or smile, 
or hope ; she could not rest unless I were altogether crushed, 
cowed, broken-in, and broken-down. According to her, 
I was born only to work for a piece of bread, to await the 
pains of death, and steadily through all life to despond. 
Reason might be right; yet no wonder we are glad at 
times to defy her, to rush from under her rod, and give a 
truant hour to Imagination — her soft, bright foe, our sweet 
Help, our divine Hope. We shall and must break bounds 
at intervals, despite the terrible revenge that awaits our 
return. Reason is as vindictive as a devil ; for me she 
was always envenomed as a stepmother. If I have obeyed 
her, it has chiefly been with the obedience of fear, not of 
love. Long ago I should have died of her ill usage, her 
stint, her chill, her barren board, her icy bed, her savage, 
ceaseless blows, but for that kinder Power who holds my 
secret and sworn allegiance. Often has Reason turned me 
out by night, in mid-winter, on cold snow, flinging for sus- 
tenance the gnawed bones dogs had forsaken ; sternly had 
she vowed her stores had nothing more for me — harshly 
denied my right to ask better things. . . . Then, looking up, 
have I seen in the sky a head amidst circling stars, of 



Her Passion 123 

which the midmost and the brightest lent a ray sympathetic 
and attent : a spirit softer and better than human Reason 
has ascended with quiet flight to the waste, bringing all 
round her a sphere of air borrowed of eternal summer; 
bringing perfume of flowers which cannot fade, fragrance of 
trees whose fruit is hfe ; bringing breezes pure from a 
world whose day needs no sun to lighten it. My hunger 
has this good angel appeased with food, sweet and strange, 
gathered amongst gleaming angels, garnering their dew- 
white harvest in the first fresh hour of a heavenly day; 
tenderly has she assuaged the insufferable tears which weep 
away life itself, kindly given rest to deadly weariness, 
generously lent hope and impulse to paralyzed despair. 
Divine, compassionate, succorable influence ! When I 
bend the knee to other than God it shall be at thy white 
and winged feet beautiful on mountain or on plain. 

Temples have been reared to the sun, altars dedicated to 
the moon. Oh, greater glory ! To thee neither hands 
build nor lips consecrate ; but hearts through ages are 
faithful to thy worship. A dwelling thou hast, too wide for 
walls, too high for dome, — a temple whose floors are 
space, rites whose mysteries transpire in presence, to the 
kindling, the harmony of worlds ! 

Sovereign complete, thou hadst, for endurance, thy 
great army of martyrs ; for achievement, thy chosen band 
of worthies. Deity unquestioned, thine essence foils decay ! 

This is the very naked flaming soul of genius. 
Analysis is helpless in its midst. For there is no 
mechanical prism, however subtly fashioned, that can 
catch its fierce white light; no cunning chemistry 
that can divide into spectral rays that light that never 
was on sea or land. 

Like all strong writers, Miss Bronte draws fre- 
quently from the Old Testament. " It is like an 



124 Charlotte Bronte 

encampment of the forest sons of Anak," says Caro- 
line of Nunnwood. The ash trees of this famed forest 
are " stately as Saul," a strange, strong simile. She 
likens herself to Jael, Sisera being her unbidden 
longings. We have seen how she lays Eve under 
contribution. When she saw Lawrence's portrait of 
Thackeray, her first words were, "And there came 
up a lion out of Judah," in characteristic contrast 
to her father, whose sole remark was that it was a 
puzzling head. 

When she writes of the sunrise, whose " herald 
breeze " fans the expectant traveller's cheek, opening 
"a clear vast path of azure, amid clouds soft as 
pearl and warm as flame," do we not catch some 
faint glimpse of what is meant by the " outgoings of 
the morning"? — as when perchance, standing on some 
sea-bitten coast in the gray interval preceding dawn, 
Nature, sweet commentator, unfolds the significance 
of " the dew of Thy birth is of the womb of the morn- 
ing." And she is terrible when Nature sounds her 
rallying bugle call. When God lets loose His 
thunder, when " storms the welkin rend," she makes 
us bow before Him who maketh the clouds His 
chariot, who walketh upon the wings of the wind. 



VII 

When she finally did marry Mr. Nicholls, did she 
love him? The most that we can say is that she 
esteemed him, that she had an affection for him. It 
was not an ideal marriage, but how many marriages 
are? It was a happy one in a negative way, and 
there is no reason to suppose that it would have 



Her Passion 125 

ceased to be so. There was no passion in it, nothing 
approaching the loves of her fictional characters. 

Mr. Shorter criticises Mrs. Gaskell for her treat- 
ment of Mr. Bronte; but his own picture of Mr. 
Nicholls is not of the most flattering sort; and Mr. 
Nicholls was alive when Mr. Shorter wrote, as was 
Mr. Bronte when Mrs. Gaskell wrote, the main point 
in much of the criticism against the latter. That he 
was tremendously in love with Charlotte, there can be 
no doubt ; what her admirers complain of is the lack 
of manliness in its manifestations. That is not a 
pleasant picture of him, sullenly silent, refusing to eat, 
quaking, white with emotion, before the whole congre- 
gation when Charlotte approaches the altar for the 
sacrament. No wonder the stern old father called 
him an unmanly driveller, and no wonder the ser- 
vants expressed their antipathy: all the world does 
not love that kind of a lover. 

We will not linger on the theme. He got more 
than his deserts in winning this woman finally, but 
so also would have almost every other man : it is not 
every day that a Robert Browning weds an Elizabeth 
Barrett. And as she was not unhappy in the out- 
come, we need not be unduly disturbed. What con- 
cerns us chiefly, and what we have to give unceasing 
thanks for, is that her matchless productions ante- 
dated her marriage ; for I verily believe that the day 
she joined hands with the Rev. Mr. Nicholls marked 
the close of her literary career. 

VIII 

And it is of the very essence of tragedy that just as 
her brave battles and bitter disappointments, her 



126 Charlotte Bronte 

biting memories and giant griefs, retroceded a little 
in the light of new interests, — that just then her life 
should be transferred from the world which she had 
served so well, in spite of its buffets, to that other 
world into which her keen vision had so often pene- 
trated before Death sealed those eloquent eyes. 
" Oh, I am not going to die, am I?" she calls out 
from her bed of pain. Like Manfred, about to take 
the fatal plunge, she in sharpest contrast saw the 
vision of actual life as only actual death can reveal it : 

Beautiful ! 
How beautiful is all this visible world! 
How glorious in its action and itself ! 

or like Miranda, with a new world of happiness open- 
ing before her: 

O wonder! 
How many goodly creatures are there here ! 
How beauteous mankind is ! O brave new world 
That has such people in 't ! 

She spake more than any one what she felt. Her 
accumulated sorrows are reflected in her work. Her 
murmurs against Fate are tempered by her belief in 
God. Her sadness is sanctified by faith. The seem- 
ing paganisms of her earth-worship rise finally through 
the veil of Christian pantheism beyond all veils to 
the right hand of the Majesty on high. She bowed, 
she fell, she lay down, where she bowed there she 
fell, but under no other hammer than the hammer 
of her griefs, and fell to rise again. Hers was no 
" angry valor dashing against the awful shield of 
God;" rather in that shield do we see reflected the 
drawn face of a long-suffering woman. 



Her Passion 127 

We do not sit at her feet to learn the wisdoms of 
philosophy; rather stand we by her side and hold 
her hand as we would the hand of a stricken sister. 
The unruffled genius of a Leonardo is not given to 
every one — the delicacy, the elevation, the serenity, 
which can view this troublesome world with untroubled 
eyes, which can attain heights of knowledge without 
any sense of dizziness, and which can add to that 
knowledge the abundant courtesy of a culture so 
calm that it must seem cruel to those toiling under 
the Frankenstein burden. The laden ones do not 
reach that perfection. Had it come before her, 
Charlotte Bronte might have joined in Matthew 
Arnold's prayer: 

Calm Soul of all things, make it mine 

To feel amid the city's jar 
That there abides a peace of thine 

Man did not make and cannot mar, 

but it would have been unanswered ; the jar of her 
city — which was the tumult of her soHtude — would 
have shaken to its foundations such transcendent 
peace. 

Not hers was the easy flow and tempered finesse 
of Miss Austen ; not hers the mastery of range with- 
in George Eliot's grasp. But for such as value the 
purity of passion, one will forever shine in a brighter 
light than those, for the light is the lustre eternal of 
elementary genius. There are many greater novel- 
ists, there are some greater women novelists. But 
even because of this Charlotte Bronte's place is all 
the more secure, as the greatest writer of pure passion 
in the English tongue. And it may be that this has 



I 28 Charlotte Bronte 

more undying fame in it than to be the greatest 
writer of fiction. Certain it is that we shall never 
have anything like the Brontes again until like 
genius mates with like innocence and like loneliness, — 
such intensity of genius yoked with such immensity 
of loneliness, in the virgin forest of innocence. 



GEORGE ELIOT 

THE LITERATURE OF POWER AND THE 
CUP OF STRENGTH 



GEORGE ELIOT 

THE LITERATURE OF POWER AND THE 
CUP OF STRENGTH 

A. — HER RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY 



Every zealous and well-directed effort to sound the 
deep stream of George Eliot's work must result in 
the discovery that the bed rock is Sympathy; and 
every faithful searcher for its source will find it arising 
from the springs of Altruism. 

It is not simple passion, as it is with poor Charlotte 
Bronte, but that complex outward kinship of feeling 
which we call ^^;;zpassion ; and which, in an intellec- 
tual being of the rarer sort, is not only the deter- 
minant of moral activities but is, preceding such 
activities, almost necessarily the result of high mental 
effort; because the natural tendency of rare intelli- 
gences is towards separation and aloofness. Indeed, 
it appears that such sympathy, attached to a life of 
creative art, must be in danger of collision with the 
separative qualities of pure intellectual productiveness. 
The art is not allowed to soar in its natural egoistic 
ether, chained as it is by human ties to human 
nature ; the fellow-feeling, by its moral massiveness, di- 
recting the mind into channels which it would not 
otherwise take, and which run deeply charged with 



132 George Eliot 

purposes issuing from that ever-active source — the 
spring of the Social Good. 

The mind of George EHot thus worked in bondage, 
but in a willing bondage, to a lofty ideal, and her 
slavery was but the livery of all thinkers whose realism 
is still in some measure controlled by an obtruding sub- 
jective conscience. It is the untroubled masters of 
the objective method — the Balzacs and Scotts — who 
alone are free. Only, we must not forget that, so 
closely have ethics penetrated to the centre of art, 
some kinds of servitude may be nobler than other 
kinds of liberty. 

II 

Two opposing contradictory traits emerge from a 
consistently intelligent sympathy: that conservatism 
which is the loving bond between us and our past, the 
threatened disruption of which fills us with sorrowful 
despair; and that radicalism which, true to its name, 
drives at the root of these conservative emotions. 
But so far from being contradictory in the destructive 
sense, their contradiction is their mutual salvation. 
Are they not, to use our author's own term, but the 
systole and diastole of human life? The rhythm of 
life needs this alternating contraction and expan- 
sion, this swinging of an infinite pendulum between a 
past and a future. Just as the photographer produces 
his positive result by his negative bath, so does a pure 
radicalism work on a necessary conservatism. And 
when you consider that this process which the plate 
undergoes before the photograph shall be perfected 
is sensitization, you will see that the simile has not 
been unwisely chosen. 



Her Religion and Philosophy 133 

If we think of George Eliot chiefly as a radical, we do 
not think of her properly. She is an artist, and therefore 
primarily conservative. The home influences and the in- 
fluences of Mid-England scenery developed and height- 
ened the strong feeling for the Anglo-Saxon attitude 
which she inherited from her father ; together with a 
tender sensibility towards the pastoral beauty of her 
native Warwickshire. " But my eyes," she says, in that 
almost autobiographical chapter ' Looking Backward,'^ 
" But my eyes at least have kept their early affection- 
ate joy in our native landscape, which is one deep 
root of our national life and language." And although 
her growing knowledge revealed much of that old 
England of her affections in the dissolving light of an 
illusion, she insists that illusions have value, " They 
feed the ideal Better, and in loving them still, we 
strengthen the precious habit of loving something not 
visibly, tangibly existent, but a spiritual product of 
our visible and tangible selves." She often smiles, 
she says in this essay, at her " consciousness that 
certain conservative prepossessions have mingled 
themselves . . . with the influences of our midland 
scenery, from the tops of the elms down to the butter- 
cups and the little wayside vetches." 

To that remarkable man, Robert Evans, carpenter, 
builder, and agent of farms, must we turn to under- 
stand how much of George Eliot's conservatism is 
due to descent, — to Robert Evans and to his father, 
George Evans, likewise carpenter and builder. The 
father of George Eliot was sixteen years old when the 

1 In ' Theophrastus.' " There are bits in the paper ' Looking 
Backward' which are true autobiography." — 'George Eliot's Life, 
as Related in her Letters and Journals ; Arranged and Edited by her 
Husband, J. W. Cross.' William Blackwood and Sons, Edinburgh and 
London, 1885, vol. i., p. 4. 



I 34 George Eliot 

French Revolution broke out; and his Toryism was 
largely a confirming result, on the naturally conserva- 
tive English mind, of the horrors of governmental 
disruption as seen in the logical outcome in France. 
Toryism meant the firm hand of Government, and 
" Government " was a religious symbol of peace and 
continuance of order. 

The habit of the artistic mind naturally conforms 
to this system, and is indelibly fashioned to it by the 
impressions of its formative period. And the political 
aspect of the people is, with such a temperament, all 
but indissolubly connected with the physical aspect of 
the country which the people inhabit. Our author 
loves the old because the people love it; and she 
never urges that kind of newness which can find no 
nourishment in a cherished past. She is in this re- 
spect, true to art; for though art is constantly return- 
ing from her creative flights with new forms, these 
forms never contradict, if they are really her own, the 
saving central ideal of beauty, which is simply truth 
to the inward intuitive perception of proportion be- 
tween mass and outline, and to the vivifying, informing 
spirit which is the inspiring life of the work. George 
Eliot is a reformer, with the Social Good as her ideal ; 
but her artistic perception restrains her innovations 
from a noisy activity. Her genius broods; it is 
meditative. 

She knew that that old England of her father's love 
had much of evil that had, in her day, disappeared. 
Yet she loved it, too, because of it she was born, and 
out of it was she nourished. She would not have 
been what she was, had it been different. She shared 
the common lot of being the product of a past, to 
which, therefore, she owed reverence. 



Her Religion and Philosophy 135 

The times, I heard, had often been bad ; but I was con- 
stantly hearing of bad times as a name for actual evenings 
and mornings when the godfathers who gave them that 
name appeared to me remarkably comfortable. Altogether, 
my father's England seemed to me lovable, laudable, full 
of good men, and having good rulers, from Mr. Pitt on to 
the Duke of Wellington, until he was for emancipating the 
Catholics ; and it was so far from prosaic to me that I 
looked into it for a more exciting romance than such as I 
could find in my own adventures, which consisted mainly 
in fancied crises calling for the resolute wielding of domes- 
tic swords and firearms against unapparent robbers, rioters, 
and invaders, who, it seemed, in my father's prime had 
more chance of being real. The morris-dancers had not 
then dwindled to a ragged and almost vanished rout (owing 
the traditional name probably to the historic fancy of our 
superannuated groom) ; also, the good old king was alive 
and well, which made all the more difference because I had 
no notion what he was and did — only understanding in 
general that if he had been still on the throne he would 
have hindered everything that wise persons thought un- 
desirable. 

Certainly that elder England with its frankly salable 
boroughs, so cheap compared with the seats obtained under 
the reformed method, and its boroughs kindly presented by 
noblemen desirous of encouraging gratitude ; its prisons 
with a miscellaneous company of felons and maniacs and 
without any supply of water; its bloated, idle charities; 
its non-resident, jovial clergy ; its militia-balloting ; and 
above all its black ignorance of what we, its posterity, 
should be thinking of it, — has great differences from the 
England of to-day. Yet we discern a strong family like- 
ness. Is there any country which shows at once as much 
stability and as much susceptibility to change as ours? 
Our national life is like that scenery which I early learned 



136 George Eliot 

to love, not subject to great convulsions, but easily showing 
more or less delicate (sometimes melancholy) effects from 
minor changes. Hence our midland plains have never lost 
their familiar expression and conservative spirit for me ; 
yet at every other mile, since I first looked on them, some 
sign of world-wide change, some new direction of human 
labor has wrought itself into what one may call the speech 
of the landscape — in contrast with those grander and 
vaster regions of the earth which keep an indifferent aspect 
in the presence of men's toil and devices. What does it 
signify that a liliputian train passes over a viaduct amidst 
the abysses of the Apennines, or that a caravan laden with 
a nation's offerings creeps across the unresting sameness of 
the desert, or that a petty cloud of steam sweeps for an 
instant over the face of an Egyptian colossus immovably 
submitting to its slow burial beneath the sand? But our 
woodlands and pastures, our hedge-parted corn-fields and 
meadows, our bits of high common where we used to plant 
the windmills, our quiet little rivers here and there fit to 
turn a millwheel, our villages along the coach-roads, are 
all easily alterable lineaments that seem to make the face 
of our Motherland sympathetic with the laborious lives of 
her children. She does not take their ploughs and waggons 
contemptuously, but rather makes every hovel and every 
sheepfold, every railed bridge or fallen tree-trunk an agree- 
ably noticeable incident ; not a mere speck in the midst of 
unmeasured vastness, but a piece of our social history in 
pictorial writing. 

Our rural tracts — where no Babel-chimney scales the 
heavens — are without mighty objects to fill the soul with 
the sense of an outer world unconquerably aloof from 
our efforts. The wastes are playgrounds (and let us try to 
keep them such for the children's children who will inherit 
no other sort of demesne) ; the grasses and reeds nod to 
each other over the river, but we have cut a canal close by ; 



Her Religion and Philosophy i 37 

the very heights laugh with corn in August or Hft the 
plough-team against the sky in September. Then comes a 
crowd of burly navvies with pickaxes and barrows, and 
while hardly a wrinkle is made in the fading mother's face 
or a new curve of health in the blooming girl's, the hills 
are cut through or the breaches between them spanned, we 
choose our level, and the white steam-pennon flies along it. 

But because our land shows this readiness to be changed, 
all signs of permanence upon it raise a tender attachment 
instead of awe ; some of us, at least, love the scanty relics 
of our forests, and are thankful if a bush is left of the old 
hedgerow. A crumbling bit of wall where the delicate ivy- 
leaved toad-flax hangs its light branches, or a bit of gray 
thatch with patches of dark moss on its shoulder and a 
troop of grass-stems on its ridge, is a thing to visit. And 
then the tiled roof of cottage and homestead, of the long 
cow-shed where generations of the milky mothers have 
stood patiently, of the broad-shouldered barns where the 
old-fashioned flail once made resonant music, while the 
watch-dog barked at the timidly venturesome fowls making 
pecking raids on the outflying grain — the roofs that have 
looked out from among the elms and walnut-trees, or beside 
the yearly group of hay and corn stacks, or below the square 
stone steeple, gathering their grey or ochre-tinted lichens 
and their olive-green mosses under all ministries, — let us 
praise the sober harmonies they give to our landscape, help- 
ing to unite us pleasantly with the elder generations who 
tilled the soil for us before we were born, and paid heavier 
and heavier taxes, with much grumbling, but without that 
deepest root of corruption — the self-indulgent despair which 
cuts down and consumes and never plants. . . . 

I belong to the "Nation of London." Why? There 
have been many voluntary exiles in the world, and prob- 
ably in the very first exodus of the patriarchal Aryans — 
for I am determined not to fetch my examples from races 



I 38 George Eliot 

whose talk is of uncles and no fathers — some of those who 
sallied forth went for the sake of a loved companionship, when 
they would willingly have kept sight of the familiar plains, 
and of the hills to which they had first lifted up their eyes. 

"What George Eliot owes to her father you may see 
in Adam Bede, Caleb Garth, and Stradivarius — as, 
near portraiture as she ever permitted herself to go. 
Moral firmness, strength of purpose, conscientious 
painstaking, faithfulness to system, a high intelligence, 
a mastery of details springing from a thorough under- 
standing of their underlying principles, a keenly de- 
veloped sense of order, and a love for hard work — 
in this she was herself Adam Bede and Caleb Garth 
and her father's true child. And that eager tenderness, 
for the country which ever haunted her in her town sur- 
roundings was, in the mystic way of such inheritances, 
a reflection of those early attachments which are the 
warp and woof of a sensitive childhood. An affec- 
tionate memory was intensified by its associations 
with a companionship quite as devoted as that of 
Maggie's with Tom's — another hint at portraiture — 
and, we have reason to believe, meeting with about 
the same response. All of that wonderful * Mill on 
the Floss ' history of childhood was, spiritually, her 
own. There is a reference to her brother's share in 
her girlhood's life in the poetical heading to the 
fifty-seventh chapter of ' Middlemarch ; ' and it shines 
with a sweet radiance in her poem * Brother and 
Sister.' 

Ill 

The artistic nature is primarily conservative. It is 
also necessarily plastic. And when it is a woman's 
nature it lacks the fuller ideality of a man's. George 



Her Religion and Philosophy 139 

Eliot, with all her masculine power, suffers in com- 
pany with all of her sisters, from this congenital — 
I will not say defect, but rather denial of nature. 
That is perhaps why no women musicians of the first 
rank have as yet appeared, although at the beginning 
of the new century there are indications that the less 
circumscribed life of women is beginning to find its first 
and finest response in music. But in that other kind of 
composing which we have here to consider, the innate 
feminine love of reality, — that is, love for an isolated 
object as the realization of an ideal — seems destined 
in the strongest of women novelists, to crowd out the 
continued contemplation of the ideal itself. That 
George Eliot is herself appreciative of this funda- 
mental characteristic is demonstrated, in her most 
mature period, in the picture of Dorothea ; the in- 
tense pity of her sympathy with her heroine being 
due to that mysterious chord of feeling between two 
sisters of the same mental and spiritual type. Hardly 
any male author of equal genius would have caused 
that girl to sacrifice herself so needlessly to such a 
pallid mistake as Casaubon. Reflecting his own ideal- 
ity, just as George Eliot reflected her lack of it, he 
would have been content to let her linger hungering 
for that ideal which, in her environment, she could 
never find ; knowing that though there be no reality, 
the ideal has a dynamic force in a " larger unity" than 
can be comprehended in any particular realization. 

I did not mean to be carried so far afield, however, 
at this time, but to point out that the traits we learn 
to know as we read her books are evident in her 
early years, — the conservatism, the plastic enthusi- 
asms, and that hungering need of realization which 
stands in the way of the " larger unity " for which she 



140 George Eliot 

strove. Her religious surroundings at school were 
ultra-Evangelical, and she imbibed them as readily as 
she aftervvards did those of the Westminster coterie. 
It is interesting to note that she recommends, in a 
letter to Miss Lewis,^ a quotation from Young, whom 
she imsparingly castigates, a little later, when the 
new influences are at work, for the very qualities for 
which the quotation stands sponsor. Her religious 
fervor at this period was apparently able to extin- 
guish her musical sensibilities, for in a letter on the 
eve of her nineteenth birthday she says, referring to 
an oratorio lately heard at Coventry, " . . . it is the 
last, I think, I shall attend. ... It would not cost me 
any regrets if the only music heard in our land were 
that of strict worship, nor can I think a pleasure that 
involves the devotion of all the time and powers of 
an immortal being to the acquirement of an expert- 
ness in so useless (at least in ninety-cases out of a 
hundred) an accomplishment can be quite pure and 
elevating in its tendency."^ She has no soul for 

1 ' Life' vol. i, p. 42. 

2 lb., vol. i., p. 44. To say that a book is good as far as it goes 
carries with it a shade of condemnation. Mr. Cross's ' Life ' is that 
kind of a book. What it gives is valuable ; what it withholds would 
have so added to its value that the reticence affects in some degree 
the utterance. It is a dignified silence, and is to that extent a happy 
contrast to the gossipy volubility which too often passes for biog- 
raphy; but the dovetailing process in this instance has conformed too 
steadily to one standard. There is no change of key, and as the key 
is high, the effect is a strained monotony. The biographer suffered 
in that his acquaintance did not date sufificiently into her early years to 
allow him to speak with both authority and interest in regard to them. 
What skill the ' Life ' has — and that is very considerable — is due to 
the affectionate intelligence of an admiring husband ; it lacks the 
highest skill of the trained writer and the born biographer. George 
Eliot's life in its fulness has never been written, nor can it ever be 
until the writer has in his possession all the letters which Mr. Cross 



Her Religion and Philosophy 141 

music, she says in this letter; and yet, seven years 
before, her music master confessed that he had no 
more to teach her, — her enthusiasm for the subject 
being of the kind reflected in her portrayal of Maggie 
Tulliver's experience "... her sensibility to the 
extreme excitement of music was only one form of 
that passionate sensibility which belonged to her 
whole nature, and made her faults and virtues all 
merge in each other — made her affections sometimes 
an important demand, but also prevented her vanity 
from taking the form of mere feminine coquetry and 
device, and gave it the poetry of ambition." Two 



has seen fit to omit from his biography, and which, of course, if they 
have not already been destroyed, could be justifiably published only 
with Mr. Cross's permission : that time, we think, will never come. 
The student desirous of supplementing Mr. Cross's collection of 
letters should consult, among other matter, the correspondence (pre- 
sumably unknown to her husband ) copied in Poet Lore, vol. vi., — some 
of it over the name of ' Clematis," given her by a girl friend, and 
appropriately, for it means 'mental beauty;' also Trollope's 'What 
I remember,' chapters xxxiv-v., and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps' paper 
in Harper's, vol. Ixiv., p. 568. 

She herself said, in a letter to Mrs. Trollope [' What I Remember,' 
p. 485]. "The best history of a writer is contained in his writings: 
there are his chief actions ; . • . biographies generally are a disease of 
English literature." Her life, indeed, must be studied mostly through 
her books, even where it differs from the books. Her father's family 
were too much estranged to have made their testimonies valuable, even 
if most of them had not already passed away. Her intellectual 
friends, Mr. Spencer, Mr. Harrison, Mr. Paul, the Coventry and 
Westminster groups, have contributed their moieties, and with that 
we must be content. Under the circumstances, Mr. Cross's book 
must remain the only authentic ' Life,' and may always be quoted 
without caveats, so far as the actual facts are recorded. [Since the 
present volume has been in type, Sir Leslie Stephen has published his 
monograph in the English Men of Letter Series [' George Eliot.' By 
Leslie Stephen. New York, The Macmillan Co. London, Macmil- 
lan Co., Ltd. 1902]. It contains no new biographical facts, although, 
of course, it is a valuable addition to the criticism of the subject]. 



142 George Eliot 

years after writing this renunciatory letter, she is dis- 
covered at the Birmingham festival hysterically sob- 
bing over the grand flow of harmonies ^ ['* The mere 
concord of octaves was a delight to Maggie "] ; and 
all through her life music was her principal solace 
and delight. Her musical evenings were those 
which gave her the most enjoyment, and it was at a 
concert that she caught her fatal cold. She was a 
fine performer on the piano, and had an exquisite 
taste. " I am very sensitive to blunders and wrong 
notes, and instruments out of tune," she says in a 
letter to Charles Lewes.^ She knew the piano well 
enough to faint-praise it as a " moderately responsive 
instrument," and she illustrates the virile power of the 
violin by the " masculine " bow. Castanets are likened 
to " crickets^ Her feeling for the nice shades of tone 
between instruments is shown in these one-word 
descriptions, as when she refers to the ^'violoncello^* 
voice of Lady Pentreath. Indeed, who will ever for- 
get the musical "notes" in her fiction? There is 
hardly a great composer of whom she has either not 
had some swift direct sympathetic word to say, or to 
whose style some indirect word perfectly fits. She 
took Haydn's measure, for example, thus: 

*' Philip burst into one of his invectives against ' The 
Creation,' the other day," said Lucy, seating herself at the 
piano. " He says it has a sort of sugared complacency 
and flattering make-believe in it, as if it were written for the 
birthday fete of a German Grand-duke." 

And does not this describe the effect of 'The 
Messiah' on a appreciative listener? — 

1 ' Life ' vol i., p. 44. * /^.^ vol. ii., p. 135. 



Her Religion and Philosophy 143 

Caleb was very fond of music, and when he could afford 
it went to hear an oratorio that came within his reach, 
returning from it with a profound reverence for this 
mighty structure of tones, which made him sit meditatively, 
looking on the floor and throwing much unutterable language 
into his outstretched hands. 

The terrible Klesmer — none but a keen musician 
could have painted the absolutely perfect picture of 
the Klesmers — must have been criticising Bellini 
when he thundered at Gwendolen: 

" That music which you sing is beneath you. It is a 
form of melody which expresses a puerile state of culture, — 
a dandling, canting see-saw kind of stuff — the passion and 
thought of people without any breadth of horizon. There 
is a sort of self-satisfied folly about every phrase of such 
melody; no cries of deep, mysterious passion — no con- 
flict — no sense of the universal. It makes men small as 
they listen to it. Sing now something larger." 

And it might just as well have been Wagner that 
he sat down to play as — 

... a composition of his own, a fantasia called Freud- 
voU, Leidvoll, Gedankvoll — an extensive commentary on 
some melodic ideas not too grossly evident ; and he certainly 
fetched as much variety and depth of passion out of the 
piano as that moderately responsive instrument lends itself 
to, having an imperious magic in his fingers that seemed to 
send a nerve-thrill through ivory key and wooden hammer, 
and compel the strings to make a quivering speech for him. 

This Klesmer, it appears, 

. . . was as versatile and fascinating as a young Ulysses 
on a sufficient acquaintance — one whom nature seemed to 



144 George Eliot 

have first made generously and then to have added music 
as a dominant power using all the abundant rest ; and, as 
in Mendelssohn, finding expression for itself not only in the 
highest finish of execution, but in that fervor of creative 
work and theoretic belief which pierces the whole future of 
a life with the light of congruous, devoted purpose. 

If you have felt the heaviness of Meyerbeer, you 
will clap your hands at this: 

" He is a friend of yours, I think." 

" No, no ; an amateur I have seen in town : Lush, a Mr. 
Lush. Too fond of Meyerbeer and Scribe — too fond of 
the mechanical-dramatic." 

Listen to Schubert's praise : 

Schubert, too, wrote for silence : half his work 
Lay like a frozen Rhine till summers came 
That warmed the grass above him. Even so ! 
His music lives now with a mighty youth. 

" There is no feeling," she says, " except the 
extremes of fear and grief, that may not find relief 
in music; " and she likens the love of Adam Bede 
to " the still rapture under the influence of autumn 
sunsets, or pillared vistas, or calm majestic statues, 
or Beethoven symphonies," losing " itself in the sense 
of divine mystery." Her finest similes are her musi- 
cal similes. Of Esther's awakening she says, " Some 
hand had touched the chords, and there came forth 
music that brought tears." And how exquisitely the 
joyous pain of echoing sensibilities to a sweet con- 
vincing song is set forth in Mrs. Meyrick's plea for 
Mi rah ! 

" Her voice is just perfect : not loud and strong, but 



Her Religion and Philosophy 145 

searching and melting, like the thoughts of what has been. 
That is the way old people like me feel a beautiful voice." 

This feeling for music was for George Eliot the 
high sublimated essence of the mingled joy and 
sorrow of life, the " plash of an oar in the evening 
lake," the " broken echoes of the heavenly choir," 
the " strains that seemed to make all sorrows natural ; " 
a spiritualizing energy and a soul of peace dwelling in 
the centre of a heart of storm. Finally, she empha- 
sizes Mr. Casaubon's selfish seclusion by making him 
confess to a distaste for musical performance. " ' I 
never could look on it in the light of a recreation to 
have my ears teased with measured noises,' said Mr. 
Casaubon." 

And yet, under the controlling force of a religious 
impulse, she deliberately denies the possession of a 
supreme quality which had been discovered years 
before ; so completely was her plastic nature in the 
grasp of that force. It is an important point, as it 
touches a fundamental characteristic, — her " radical- 
ism," which was soon to supervene, being primarily 
due to extraneous influence, as was this pietistic 
period. 

IV 

In a letter to Miss Lewis under the date of the 
twelfth of August, 1840,^ in connection with a dis- 
quisition on the Epistle to the Colossians, in which 
she adopts with enthusiasm the stereotyped Calvin- 
istic term, " filthy rags," is to be found mention of the 
first book which had a subtile influence on the un- 

1 ' Life,' vol. i., pp. 70 seq. 
10 



146 George Eliot 

settling of this same Calvinism, — Isaac Taylor's 
'Ancient Christianity;' thus preparing the way for 
the dominance of the Brays and Hennells in the fol- 
lowing year, although that would have had its full 
effect on her under other conditions. It is to be 
noted in passing merely as an interesting incident 
of the accidental sort, for in the extensive list of her 
reading at this time may be found a large amount of 
matter easily convertible into agnostic ammunition. 

Hennell's ' Inquiry,' probing into the very origin of 
the beliefs which she had absorbed, had a powerful 
effect upon her. It was a new kind of writing, a pre- 
cursor of the present critical freedom of investigation ; 
and the book was among the first of a large class to 
dwell upon the natural history of the Jewish people ; 
their gradual growth being conceived as leading, 
along the lines of evolutionary order, and apart from 
special divine interference, to the production of Jesus. 
Christianity is traced to the enthusiasm generated by 
the character and career of Jesus, followed by the 
accession of Gentile converts, the absorption into 
the new belief of the prevailing Greek philosophy, 
and the decay of the old Olympus ; the Hebrew 
theocracy disappearing in the religious revolution. 
Jesus, under the exalted inspiration that he was the 
Messiah — as the result of his schooling in the Essene 
philosophy, joined with an ardent patriotism — 
preached the " kingdom of heaven," confident that 
divine power would make manifest his claim to 
David's throne; and his teaching changed as it 
became apparent that no such manifestation would 
occur; the idea of a conquering Messiahship now 
appearing as a glory to be reached only by suffering 
and death. The belief in the Resurrection was, accord- 



Her Religion and Philosophy 147 

ing to this view, based on the actual disappearance of 
the body of Jesus, and its preaching was allowed as 
less harmful to the civic peace than the claims of a 
living Messiah. 

This is the book which entered George Eliot's life 
at the time when the influences which intensified her 
Evangelicalism were melting under the stronger in- 
fluences of rationalistic beliefs; and I have dwelt 
upon the position of the ' Inquiry ' at some length 
to illustrate how easily a plastic nature may be 
fashioned by the right hand to new modes of thought 
of diametric opposition to the old. And while we 
are free to suppose that if the religion of her child- 
hood had been of a more buoyant, more inclusive 
sort, the break with it would have been less severe, — 
had there been less of Hannah More in the old, there 
would have been less of Herbert Spencer in the new, 
— with her ready acquisitiveness, the change was in 
some way destined to be wrought out under any con- 
ditions; and the 'Inquiry' went home, backed by 
constant intercourse with the Hennell family. The 
book is remarkable as indicating the evolutionary 
method in the historical field several years before that 
method was firmly established by Darwin's great 
theory. It exchanges a natural history for a super- 
natural, and subjects miracles to the microscope of 
reason, — a process inimical to a belief which is es- 
sentially transcendental. The Germans had labori- 
ously arrived at the same conclusions, and their most 
eminent champion, Strauss, thought so highly of 
Mr. Hennell's work that he had it translated into his 
language, and wrote a commendatory preface. 

Her own translation of Strauss augmented this 
widening departure; and the picture of this enthusi- 



148 George Eliot 

astic, delicate girl toiling across that fearful morass, 
faithful to her aim, but sick at heart (Strauss-sick, she 
said she was) with her destructive task, is, I venture 
to believe, the most pathetic portrait in the whole sad 
wilderness of mistaken effort. ^ Christianity was full 
of poetry to her, with " its Hebrew retrospect and 
millennial hopes ; " and this German Goliath was in 
method and purpose the incarnate antagonism of this 
embodied poetry. His ' Leben ' was an epoch-making 
book, and every serious subsequent work on the rise 
of Christianity bears some relation to it; but the 
abnormal analytical development of his mind de- 
barred him from that synthetic and constructive 
sympathy in the atmosphere of which a spirit like 
George Eliot's must find breathing room or die. 
Was there ever another picture like that of this 
woman bending over the dissection of " the beautiful 
story of the Crucifixion," nerved to what she believed 
to be a duty in behalf of truth by the image of that 
Suffering Christ over her desk — the image of Him 
who said He was the truth — keeping her to what she 
thought was the truth in widening the influence of a 
work destructive of that truth ! 



V 

Do you wonder at the change? Yet it is the same 
Marian Evans we saw before, denying herself music 
on religious grounds, and talking about filthy rags. 
Her plastic nature is simply in another environment, 
and is being worked upon by other forces ; her pecu- 
liar susceptibility to such forces being evidenced by 

^ The nearest approach to it that I know of is the picture of Anne 
Bronte at work on the ' Tenant of Wildfell Hall.' 



Her Religion and Philosophy 149 

the strong inherent dissimilarity between the underly- 
ing spiritual habits — so to speak — of such a man as 
Strauss, the unsympathetic, the anti-poetical and de- 
structive, and the future author of ' Adam Bede.' 

We have no record of the effect upon her of 
Strauss's final word of importance on religion, pub- 
lished in 1872; but if she read it, it must have been 
with regret at her impulsive connection with his ear- 
lier performance, for that final word was the word 
of a discredited and inconsistent negation, giving 
offence even to his scientific followers because of its 
total lack of spiritual light and because of its credulity. 
This was the outcome of the philosophy which moved 
George Eliot to the painful task of translation, a phi- 
losophy opposed to all that is best in her own system 
of thought. And yet — consider the marvel — there 
is no more honest work in the history of literature. 
It is the only English translation of the * Leben,' and 
it stands to-day unassailed in point of scholarship. 
Strauss was delighted with it, saying in his preface " et 
accurata et perspicua; " which reminds us of George 
Eliot's own expressed ideal in * Romola,' " accuracy 
the very soul of scholarship." 

It should not be supposed that because of this plas- 
ticity, there was complete intellectual submission. 
That would have been impossible to a mind charged 
with a moral earnestness jealous of its emotional out- 
lets. George Eliot never gave her mind, after it was 
once awakened, completely to any system of belief, 
— not even to Positivism ; for although she contributed 
to the cause, she would not bind herself to the extent 
of joining with the Positivist church. It is a " note " 
of every high intelligence to be discerning; and to 
say that George Eliot was influenced by her en- 



150 George Eliot 

vironment to the extent of extinguishing her dis- 
cernment is to deny her her undeniable prerogative, and 
to turn her into the company of slaves. She thought 
Strauss often wrong in details, and did not even con- 
sider his theory perfect, but " only one element in a 
perfect theory;" and her spirit shied at his lack of 
spirit. After all, the idea back of the translation served 
rather an intellectual than a moral purpose, difficult 
as it is to separate the two in such a mind. It had the 
element of curiosity in it ; and coming after the ' In- 
quiry,' and in the Bray-Hennell surroundings, it pro- 
voked an intellect already set on new tracks to a 
further investigation of their direction. Finally, in 
connection with her work on Spinoza, it prepared 
the way for that other translation — the only one 
she published under her own name — into which she 
entered with a more grateful spirit, imbued as it was 
with beliefs which kindled her generosity and shook 
into full flower the budding convictions of her thought. 

VI 

If with all the independence belonging to a discern- 
ing intelligence of eminent power, she is nevertheless 
malleable to an unlovely religion and to an unsym- 
pathetic German philosophy, consider how deep was 
the response of her soul to this new influence ; con- 
tinuing, indeed, the critical method she had been fol- 
lowing,but substituting a warm moral teaching for cold, 
abstract negations. Such was Feuerbach's ' Wesen,' 
rank its author though we must among the atheists. 
The translation of Spinoza's ' Tractatus ' helped to 
develop her sceptical tendencies, which, when she 
came to Feuerbach, were at their highest pitch through 



Her Religion and Philosophy 151 

constant association with the Westminster circle. Not 
that the metaphysical scheme of Spinoza, as shown in 
the ' Ethics,' which she took up later, influenced her 
deeply, for its absolute pantheism is naturally opposed 
to that desire to investigate the laivs of phenomena 
which is the moving power of Positivism ; and very 
early in Miss Evans's development we see this ten- 
dency towards the Positive belief. In the 'Ethics,' 
however, she came upon a system of morality very 
akin to the spirit of Positivism, which ruled all her 
after labors : a system of self-assertion losing itself in 
love of man and God, the happiness which crowns its 
fulfilment resting in virtue rather than in the rewards 
of virtue. "The God-intoxicated Spinoza," old Nov- 
alis called him, but, enthusiasms aside, we cannot 
escape seeing the logical outcome of pantheism to be 
atheism ; and although in a speculative sense, panthe- 
ism may be regarded as a God-intoxication, the cold- 
blooded Hume was nearer the exact truth when he 
referred to Spinoza as " the famous atheist." 

His denial of immortality placed Feuerbach, too, 
in the same category; but his peculiar charm for 
George Eliot lay in his revolt from the mere jugglery 
of metaphysics and in his belief that the search for 
truth should be grounded upon the investigation of 
actual phenomena, — this and the correspondence he 
claims to exist between the articles of Christian belief 
and the necessities of human nature, each belief being 
the creation of some natural wish. The removal of 
the supernatural from Christianity necessitates a 
natural explanation for Christian beliefs and prac- 
tices ; and to a generous mind such an explanation 
must be based on a hope amounting to conviction of 
the gradual upward tendency of human desire, through 



152 George Eliot 

the efiforts of those who have at heart the Social 
Good. 

The morahty of the system of Feuerbach is of this 
elevated order, and it found an echo in his translator. 
He aims always at reality. " Let us concentrate our- 
selves on what is real," he says, " and great men will 
revive, and great actions will return." " Health is 
more than immortality" is his doctrine, — that is, 
social health ; and that is the chief note of George 
Eliot also. The doctrine of the Resurrection would 
be explained by Feuerbach as the embodiment of the 
instinct in man for the continuity and perpetuity of 
life; and, ethically, he would teach the value of the 
instinct as a part of that highest good which man 
creates out of his longings, and towards which he 
worships. But the practical atheism of his teaching 
was proved by its failure when applied by the Ger- 
man communists to their lives ; its self-centred divin- 
ity necessarily excluding any moral obligation outside 
of self. Unfortunately for all such systems, mankind 
is composed of units, and the units not being for the 
most part full of an exalted social morality, — not 
units like Feuerbach and George Eliot, — each unit 
will eventually become a law unto itself, with an 
ensuing anarchy.^ 

The struggle of George Eliot was between her de- 
sire to help others by the application of an ennobling 
system of life, and her purely intellectual convictions. 
She was in the position of Kant, who strove to erect 
with his left hand what his right hand had destroyed ; 
and she followed Kant's lead in her difificulty by 

1 Mallock's ' Is Life Worth Living ? ' chaps, i.-x. inc., is the unan- 
swerable argument to all anthropocentric systems of morality. 



Her Religion and Philosophy 153 

separating the sphere of cognition from that of will. 
There is no God such as the Christians have believed 
in, but there is duty, there are moral obligations and 
a necessity for raising life from low to high planes. 
So Kant, swallowing his formula, in Carlyle's phrase, 
was bound to divorce duty from the sphere of cogni- 
tion, the conception of duty being incognizable in 
his philosophy. A Kritik of Practical Reason had 
thus to follow, to make a place for the morality 
which the Kritik of Pure Reason had, metaphysically, 
abolished. 

George Eliot's philosophy was moral, not meta- 
physical, because metaphysics is insensible to moral- 
ity. The Social Good takes the place of God ; and 
this was so much of a personality to her that the 
capital letters are justified, like Herbert Spencer's 
Ultimate Reality and Matthew Arnold's Something 
not Ourselves. The household goods become the 
household's God. She gives to the attributes of God 
the personality belonging to God, making them God, 
and calling God by the names of the attributes, as in 
her beautiful reference to the Unseen Pity. The re- 
sult would be considered a kind of sublimated poly- 
theism, if a rhetorical allowance were not made for 
an emotional — of course, I am using the word in its 
best and highest sense — writer warmed through and 
through with altruistic fire. 

There is with her an outer conscience, the moral 
test being based on an intellectual comprehension of 
what is best and worst for society in each given case. 
In depicting Tito's first determining act in persuad- 
ing himself, against himself, of his father's death, she 
says: 



154 George Eliot 

But the inward shame, the reflex of that outward law 
which the great heart of mankind makes for every indi- 
vidual man, a reflex which will exist even in the absence 
of the sympathetic impulses that need no law, but rush to 
the deed of fidelity and pity as inevitably as the brute 
mother shields her young from the attack of the hereditary 
enemy, — that inward shame was showing its blushes in 
Tito's determined assertion to himself that his father was 
dead, or that at least search was hopeless. 

Further on, as the dilemma begins to press him 
more urgently: 

Having once begun to explain away Baldassare's claim, 
Tito's thought showed itself as active as a virulent acid, 
eating its rapid way through all the tissues of sentiment. 
His mind was destitute of that dread which has been erro- 
neously decried as if it were nothing higher than a man's 
animal care for his own skin : that awe of the Divine Nem- 
esis which was felt by religious pagans, and, though it 
took a more positive form under Christianity, is still felt by 
the mass of mankind simply as a vague fear at anything 
which is called wrong-doing. Such terror of the unseen is 
so far above mere sensual cowardice that it will annihilate 
that cowardice : it is the initial recognition of a moral law 
restraining desire, and checks the hard, bold scrutiny of 
imperfect thought into obligations which can never be 
proved to have any sanctity in the absence of feeling. " It 
is good," sing the old Eumenides, in ^schylus, " that fear 
should sit as the guardian of the soul, forcing it into wis- 
dom, — good that men should carry a threatening shadow 
in their hearts under the full sunshine ; else how shall they 
learn to revere the right? " That guardianship may become 
needless ; but only when all outward law has become need- 
less, — only when duty and love have united in one stream 
and made a common force. 



Her Religion and Philosophy 155 

But here the difficulty of the Feuerbach revolution- 
ists meets us again, for how is this " outward " moral- 
ity, which " the great heart of mankind " makes for 
every man, to be applied where perceptions are not 
fine, as with most, and where the intellect is limited, 
as with all? Christianity has its outward conscience, 
too, in its Sinai and its Sermon on the Mount; and 
its inner conscience is the divine reflex, to borrow 
George Eliot's own phrase, of this outer. It is di- 
vine because it is a reflection of the divine, whereas 
an anthropocentric system (which, be it remembered, 
is the only system remaining after the removal of the 
divine) makes the divine human, because it is a re- 
flection of the human. 

VII 

It is peculiarly appropriate, in a review of George 
Eliot's philosophy, to quote the definition of that 
doctrine which, more than any other, filled her life, 
given by the man who, more than any other, moulded 
it. " This is the mission of Positivism," says Mr. 
Lewes,^ " to generalize science, and to systematize 
sociality; in other words, it aims at creating a phi- 
losophy of the sciences as a basis for a new social 
faith. A social doctrine is the aim of Positivism, a 
scientific doctrine the means, just as a man's intelli- 
gence is the minister and interpreter of life." Ac- 
cording to Comte, the theological or supernatural 
phase of intellectual evolution is that in which the 
mind seeks <:«z^i"^^ for phenomena; the metaphysical 
that in which abstract forces are found inherent in 

^ Comte's ' Philosophy of the Sciences.' By G. H. Lewes. Bohn, 
London, 1853, section i, p. 9. 



156 George Eliot 

substances ; and the positive phase that in which 
causes are not looked for either above or in matter, 
but laws. Conditions, not theories, form the funda- 
mental groundwork of the Positive scheme. 

The fourth and last volume of Comte's ' Polity ' was 
published in 1854, the first year of George Eliot's 
union with Lewes, and Lewes was an ardent admirer 
of the Frenchman's philosophy. In the classification 
of the sciences which Comte efi'ected, Sociology is 
placed in the list after Biology, on the ground that 
the facts of human society may not be successfully 
studied without reference to the facts of animal life. 
Mr. Lewes' interest in Comte was undoubtedly due, 
primarily, to this scientific method, the " scientific 
doctrine " appealing to him as an enthusiastic student 
of biology, and awakening in him a curiosity to dis- 
cover the intermediary relations between the various 
forms of life ; and although he never accepted the 
full doctrine of Comte, and published his divergences 
with sufficient emphasis to sever the friendship exist- 
ing between them,^ Comte's attempt at co-ordination 
was nevertheless enough to rank Lewes among the 
Positivists. 

The social doctrine as the aim of the system, of 
which the scientific doctrine was the preparation, 
dominated George Eliot's thought because it arranged 
the life of man — his mind, his force, his hopes and 
aspirations — in an order which gave the fullest scope 
to its beneficent play. Comte had no faith in political 
salvations, in righteousness made easy by parliaments, 
but recognized the profound truth that social excel- 



1 Leslie Stephen : article ' Lewes ' in ' Dictionary of National 
Biography.' 



Her Religion and Philosophy 157 

lence must be the result of moral effort. Selfishness 
blocks this effort, and the social feeling blocks selfish- 
ness, egoism giving place to altruism. Intellect had 
been enslaved by the Church, and had naturally re- 
volted. The feelings had been unduly exalted, and 
were in consequence unduly debased. Now was the 
intellect to serve the feelings, not in the old slavish 
way, but with a new glad liberty. This is religion, 
which in view of the illimitable network of life, must 
include all of that life in its scope. The great uni- 
versal order which the inter-relationship of the sciences 
revealed was always before George Eliot; but the 
chief scientific value of Positivism was for her, as it 
was for Comte himself, in its application to human 
conduct. 

An explanation of her charity — what I have called 
her compassion — is discoverable in her adoption of 
the Positive classification, for it taught her that a man, 
as a member of human society, could not be under- 
stood unless the facts of that portion of the society 
which constituted his environment were properly 
comprehended ; which, in turn, were to be understood 
only by a comprehension of the biological conditions 
upon which the facts of human society rest. Before 
utterly condemning a man's lamentable shortcomings, 
therefore, we should consider several things, — envi- 
ronment, habit, heredity, — and should temper our 
judgments accordingly. But this simply afforded a 
scientific excuse for the religious end and aim of the 
philosophy, — altruism. The ruling power within the 
great universal order, bringing it " continually to per- 
fection by constantly conforming to its laws " — its 
soul and its spirit — is Humanity, which Comte ele- 
vates to the throne of divinity, calling it " Our Provi- 



158 George Eliot 

dence," and " The Great Being." "This undeniable 
Providence, the supreme dispenser of our destinies, 
becomes in the natural course the common centre of 
our affections, our thoughts, and our actions. Al- 
though this Great Being evidently exceeds the utmost 
strength of any, even of any collective human force, 
its necessary constitution and its peculiar function 
endow it with the truest sympathy towards all its 
servants. The least amongst us ought constantly to 
aspire to maintain and even to improve this Being. 
This natural object of all our activity, both public and 
private, determines the true general character of the 
rest of our existence, whether in feeling or in thought ; 
which must be devoted to love, and to know, in order 
rightly to serve, our Providence, by a wise use of all 
the means which it furnishes to us. Reciprocally, the 
continued service, whilst strengthening our true unity, 
renders us at once both happier and better."^ 

In other words, Comte said : Religion belongs to 
life. Life is, in its fullest development, Humanity. 
The God of religion is therefore Humanity. And 
while some of his scientific followers, like Littre, base 
their support exclusively on the first half of his work, 
going so far as to think that the extravagances of the 
reactionary last half are due to mental unbalance, the 
effort in the " Polity " at superstructure on a hitherto 
laid foundation is nevertheless apparent. It is, indeed, 
reactionary in so far as it has to account for the Ab- 
solute, which is excluded in the " Philosophy " as not 
properly subject to law, and as therefore not a subject 
for scientific, i. e., positive, thought. But the wants 



1 ' System of Positive Polity ' by Auguste Comte. Longmans, Green 
& Co., London, 1875, vol. ii., p. 53. 



Her Religion and Philosophy 159 

of man's nature must betaken into account; and so, 
under the same necessity which forced Kant to write 
his second Kritik, we have Comte's " social doctrine." 
It is the old story. Neither Kant nor Comte can 
eliminate God. 

George Eliot, like Mr, Lewes, never went the full 
length of Comtism. Her sense of humor, no doubt, 
prevented her from joining the Positivist church, and 
she must have looked with pity upon the amazing 
sacerdotalism which it borrowed from the Catholics. 
She acknowledges it to be one-sided.-^ But it influ- 
enced her more than any other influence of her life. 
Writing from Biarritz in 1867, she says, "... after 
breakfast we both read the ' Politique ' — George one 
volume and I another, interrupting each other con- 
tinually with questions and remarks. That morning 
study keeps me in a state of enthusiasm through the 
day — a moral glow which is a sort oi milieji siibjectif 
for the sublime sea and sky; " and Mr. Cross says : 
" For all Comte's writing she had a feeling of high 
admiration, intense interest, and very deep sympathy. 
I do not think I ever heard her speak of any writer 
with a more grateful sense of obligation for enlighten- 
ment." ^ Her selective discernment rejected the ritual, 
the sacerdotal claims, the extraordinary pretensions 
to dictatorship of a thinker whose exalted motive she 
reverenced ; and while she never consciously wor- 
shipped humanity, the animating idea of Comte's 
system she recognized as the best idea for men. Her 
books quiver with it, and all her contrasts are drawn 
with the intention of showing the two contending 
forces in interplay: egoism and altruism; the self- 
concentration which in ministering to personal grati- 

1 'Life,' vol. ii., p. 139. 2 lb., vol. iii., p. 419. 



i6o George Eliot 

fications, to the exclusion of the social good, hinders 
that good according to the varying degrees of its 
pernicious activity; and, opposed to this, the cen- 
tring of the life on a sympathetic attempt towards 
perfecting and ever more perfecting the social good 
by relegating self to its proper place among the other 
units. Thus Casaubon plays against Dorothea, 
Rosamond against Lydgate, Tito against Romola, 
Romola against Savonarola, Sylva against Zarca, 
Esther and Harold against Felix and Mr. Lyon. The 
cold, deadening, snaky qualities of Grandcourt's ego- 
ism become repellent to Gwendolen only as the 
opposing warm, vivifying, sympathetic altruism of 
Deronda begins to stream upoa her. 

It was an heroic belief, for she was fighting under 
a standard which had no standard-bearer ; and it is 
as fine a spectacle as that of the Spartans fighting in 
the shade. There was no exemplar, no Captain of 
salvation. The Luther she admires could not have 
fought thus, and the finest tribute to her Savonarola 
must always be that it is true to the Christian ideal 
of Christ, without which the historical Savonarola 
could not have defied the powers of darkness. 

VIII 

It is not quite fair to say that the sadness of George 
Eliot's work comes from a lack of belief In a divine 
Person, or from a disbelief in Christian immortality, 
because there are a good many " orthodox " novelists 
who are sad, and not a few agnostics who are merry. 
George Eliot did not make life sad ; she found it so, 
just as the painter finds the sunset tender, and so 
represents it on his canvas. Furthermore, the genius 



Her Religion and Philosophy i6i 

of the author is engaged in the demonstration of why- 
it is sad, and in suggesting the removal, or at least 
the bettering of its conditions by the substitution of 
sympathy for selfishness. 

Egoism is sin, she says again and again ; and she 
believes that its wages is death — the death of noble 
effort and strenuous moral activity, of high purpose 
and generous endeavor, of " the thoughts that urge 
man's search to vaster issues," of goodness in a world 
meant to be good — for so she believed — and of 
that love which is its essence. So far as moral pur- 
pose is concerned, what more does the Christian 
believe? Christianity, indeed, holds positively what 
Positivism holds positively, but it also holds positively 
what Positivism implicitly denies. 

George Eliot said she would consent to have a year 
dipt off her life " for the sake of witnessing such a 
scene as that of the men of the barricades [in Paris] 
bowing to the image of Christ, who first taught 
fraternity to men."^ In her early days at least Chris- 
tian teaching did not dwell as tenaciously as it does 
now on the brotherhood of man. The Evangelical- 
ism of her childhood certainly did not inculcate a 
knowledge of belief in, and love for, the fatherhood 
of God because of the brotherhood of man, through 
the connecting link of Christ the Elder Brother. The 
Suffering Christ was, on the one hand, too much of a 
theological idea, and, on the other, too much of a 
mechanical picture, to hinder the growing thought of 
the young century from forming new ideas of frater- 
nity entirely freed from the theological standards 



1 'Life,' vol. i., p. 179. In a letter concerning the second French 
revolution. 



1 62 George Eliot 

which had in large part ceased to convince. To-day 
there is a convergence of Christian and agnostic 
altruism, and their ethical standards are practically 
identical. It is because the fulness of Christianity, 
which in the inertness of those evil days — evil be- 
cause inert — lay shrivelled in dry formulas, has 
now opened upon the Church with its beautiful 
humanities, with its practical enforcements to " do 
good and distribute," and with its benevolences, 
guilds, and brotherhoods as the direct outcome of 
its spirit. 

Christianity, as Mr. Mallock has pointed out, has 
so permeated the thought of man that it has become 
" mixed " with that thought ; and thinkers like George 
Eliot are, in spite of theoretical beliefs and disbeliefs, 
bound to breathe a moral air saturated with Christian 
principles. When Dorothea, after her night of agony, 
goes to Rosamond, she sinks the selfish promptings 
of a justifiable indignation in a large charity which 
lovingly discerns the evil inherent in the indignation 
if nourished to the exclusion of the " precious seeing " 
of the possibilities of allaying the troubles even of the 
personal cause of the indignation ; and by so doing 
becomes the "sweet presence of a good diffused "which 
will bear its share in the general progress towards 
light and right. We instinctively say she does a 
Christian act. She suffers long, and nevertheless is 
kind. She does unto others as she would, in her best 
moments, have others do unto her. Dorothea, we 
are told, had ceased to pray, apparently on the 
ground that prayer is egotistical (as if good Chris- 
tians Hmited their petitions to personal requests, like 
Bulstrode. The noblest prayer, the pre-eminently 
Christian prayer, Christ's own prayer, is the opposite 



Her Religion and Philosophy 163 

of this ^) ; but if conduct is three-fourths of life, then 
that proportion of her Hfe is Christian. It is the 
other quarter which she misses, and which her creator 
missed. 



IX 

Had George Eliot's star arisen a little later, it 
would, I think, have shone in a clearer sky. We have 
seen how impressionable, how malleable she was. 
The doctrine of evolution was in its earliest develop- 
ment in her day, — the scientists of her acquaintance 
holding that life was the creature of organism, and 
therefore material and not immortal. She might, if 
living now, be entertaining the hope of the evolu- 
tionists who followed Darwin, that life is not the crea- 
ture, but the maker of organism, — a hope entirely 
consistent with the hope of Christianity. We must 
consider George Ehot the greatest of all moralists 
in literature, because, in view of the terrible conse- 
quences of a materialistic conviction of life upon a 
naturally idealistic temperament, her emotions are 
stirred all the more generously by the aspect of the 
pain involved in the constant struggle for existence. 
With no faith in another, future, life to explain the 
purpose of that struggle, she nevertheless found a 
moral philosophy in the contemplation of a life of 

1 She herself says, in 'Daniel Deronda': " The most powerful 
movement of feeling with a liturgy is the prayer which seeks for noth- 
ing special, but is a yearning to escape from the limitations of our 
own weakness, and an invocation of all Good to enter and abide with 
us; or else a self-oblivious lifting up of gladness, a Gloria in Excelsis 
that such good exists; both the yearning and the exaltation gathering 
their utmost force from the sense of communion in a form which has 
expressed them both for long generations of struggling fellow-men.*' 



164 George Eliot 

social helpfulness which was, to all practical intents 
and purposes, Christian. ^ 

She sees duty in the light of moral emotion, rather 
than in that of religious enthusiasm. But the impor- 
tant point is that it is duty that she sees. She was 
neither a Far Seer like Emerson, nor a prophet like 
Ruskin, nor a cold Wisdom like Goethe. She ad- 
mired Emerson so much on meeting him in 1848 as 
to say, " I have seen Emerson, — the first man I have 
ever seen."'^ But her genius had really but little in 
common with a transcendentalism which, like a fly- 
ing machine beyond the control of its maker, is likely 
to land one in a morass beyond the highways of hu- 
man experience. And her feeling for others, her 
reverence for the reverence of others, as a part of the 
force spiritualizing the solidarity of mankind, would 
have restrained her from the occasional extravagances 
of Emerson, such as his " Jesus would absorb the 
race ; but Tom Paine or the coarsest blasphemer 
helps humanity by resisting this exuberance of 
power." As for prophecy, it is nearer to the human 
heart to tell of actual experiences in the light of pres- 
ent known conditions than to foretell future conditions 
involving experiences not yet actual. And the danger 
underlying the Ruskin attitude is sufficiently indi- 
cated in the cruelly mistaken criticism of George Eliot's 
own work which the author of 'Modern Painters' 
persuaded an editor (doubtless by the magic of his 
name, for from scarcely another would it have been 
accepted) to publish.^ Finally, as compared with 

1 It is significant that the last word she ever wrote was the word 
"affection," in her unfinished letter to Mrs. Strachey. 'Life,' vol. iii., 
p. 438. 

2 ' Life,' vol. i., p. 191. 

8 ' Fiction Fair and Foul,' Nineteenth Century, October, 1881. 



Her Religion and Philosophy 165 

Goethe, she may be said to have the wisdom which 
comes from experience. " Experientia docet," even 
though we must add, "tristiter." Goethe is her supe- 
rior in a certain calm, sphynx-Hke wisdom, but, as he 
has himself said, he knew Man better than men ; and 
he lacked the sympathy which must destroy this 
Olympian sagaciousness. If the humanity of George 
Eliot's wisdom sometimes prevented its freest exer- 
cise, it errs in high company. The wisest man who 
ever lived once said a foolish thing, for he said, 
" Everything is vanity; " whereas we who are not so 
wise know better. Wisdom, with a sympathetic 
thinker, is always seen through the lumen Jmmidum 
of feeling. Goethe, on the contrary, saw life through 
dry spectacles. 

X 

" The idea of God," says George Eliot, in her essay 
against Evangelical teaching of the Gumming type, 
" is really moral in its influence, — it really cherishes all 
that is best and loveliest in man, only when God is con- 
templated as sympathizing with the pure elements of 
human feeling, as possessing infinitely all those attri- 
butes which we recognize to be moral in humanity;" 
and her quarrel with Dr. Gumming was precisely that 
his God was the opposite of this. " He is a God who, 
instead of adding his solar force to swell the tide 
of those impulses that tend to give humanity a com- 
mon life in which the good of one is the good of all, 
commands us to check those impulses lest they 
should prevent us from thinking of his glory." 

The God she here sketches as a possible ideal is, 
in reality, the God of the Christian ideal of these last 



1 66 ' George Eliot 

times ; while Dr. Cumming's divinity, so mercilessly 
exposed by her, is no longer a living God, because 
he cannot now be reconciled with noble feeling. ^ 
And though we must regard as illusions, George 
Eliot seems to say, much which has been accepted as 
fact, the illusions are only reprehensible when they 
do not fit into this sympathetic idea of God. After 
Harold Transome had left Mr. Lyon, on his election- 
eering tour, the author imagines a cynical sprite rid- 
ing on one of the motes in the dusty study of the 
little minister, and making merry at his illusions in 
regard to the Radical candidate. She cannot help 
smiling herself, but she immediately falls to peni- 
tence and veneration. 

1 It is only certain kinds of preaching she objects to. "Yesterday, 
for the first time, we went to hear A. (a popular preacher). I remem- 
ber what you said about his vulgar, false emphasis ; but there re- 
mained the fact of his celebrity. I was glad of the opportunity. 
But my impression fell below the lowest judgment I ever heard passed 
upon him. He has a gift of a fine voice, very flexible and various ; he 
is admirably fluent and clear in his language, and every now and then 
his enunciation is effective. But I never heard any pulpit reading 
and speaking which, in its level tone, was more utterly common and 
empty of guiding intelligence or emotion; it was as if the words had 
been learned by heart and uttered without comprehension by a man 
who had no instinct of rhythm or music in his soul. And the doctrine ! 
It was a libel on Calvinism that it should be presented in such a 
form. I never heard any attempt to exhibit the soul's experience 
that was more destitute of insight. The sermon was against Fear, in 
the elect Christian, as being a distrust of God ; but never once did he 
touch the true ground of fear — the doubt whether the signs of God's 
choice are present in the soul. We had plenty of anecdotes, but they 
were all poor and pointless, — Tract Society anecdotes of the feeblest 
kind. It was the most superficial grocer's-back-parlor view of Cal- 
vinistic Christianity; and I was shocked to find how low the mental 
pitch of our society must be, judged by the standard of this man's 
celebrity. . . . 

"Just now, with all Europe stirred by events that make every 
conscience tremble after some great principle as a consolation 



Her Religion and Philosophy 167 

For what we call illusions are often, in truth, a wider 
vision of past and present realities — a willing movement of 
a man's soul with the larger sweep of the world's forces — 
a movement towards a more assured end than the chances 
of a single life. We see human heroism broken into units 
and say, This unit did little — might as well not have been. 
But in this way we might break a great army into units ; in 
this way we might break sunlight into fragments, and think 
that this and the other might be cheaply parted with. Let 
us rather raise a monument to the soldiers whose brave 
hearts only kept the ranks unbroken, and met death — a 
monument to the faithful who were not famous, and who are 
precious as the continuity of the sunbeams is precious, though 
some of them fall unseen and on barrenness. 

At present, looking back on that day at Treby, it seems to 
me that the sadder illusion lay with Harold Transome, who 
was trusting in his own skill to shape the success of his 
own morrows, ignorant of what many yesterdays had deter- 
mined for him beforehand. 

This inclusive brotherhood was always in her vision, 
and the large view of it here shown is but an extension 

and guide, it was too exasperating to sit and listen to doctrine that 
seemed to look no further than the retail Christian's tea and muffins. 
He said, ' Let us approach the throne of God,' very much as he might 
have invited you to take a chair ; and then followed this fine touch : 
' We feel no love to God because he hears the prayers of others ; 
it is because he hears my prayer that I love him.' " — ' Life,' vol. iii., 
pp. 121 seq. 

In a letter to Mrs. Ponson1:)y, from Hertfordshire, she says : " I 
prefer a country where I don't make bad blood by having to see one 
public house to every six dwellings — which is literally the case in 
many spots around us. My gall rises at the rich brewers in parlia- 
ment and out of it, who plant these poison shops for the sake of 
their million-making trade, while probably their families are figuring 
somewhere as refined philanthropists or devout evangelicals and 
ritualists." — ' Life,' vol. iii., p. 245. See also vol. iii., pp. 253-255. 

The nobler preaching, like the nobler living, she had no quarrel 
with. 



1 68 George Eliot 

of that simple elementary feeling which stirs the pulses 
of a child, as surely as it awakens the desires of a 
man. As Tom and Maggie were setting out for their 
home on that desolate November morning, their youth 
already joined with sorrow, — 

Mrs. Stalling came with a little basket, which she hung 
on Maggie's arms, saying, " Do remember to eat something 
on the way, dear." Maggie's heart went out towards this 
woman whom she had never liked, and she kissed her 
silently. It was the first sign within the poor child of that 
new sense which is the gift of sorrow — that susceptibility to 
the bare offices of humanity which raises them into a bond 
of loving fellowship, as to haggard men among the icebergs 
the mere presence of an ordinary comrade stirs the deep 
fountains of affection.^ 



XI 

This, then, was the religion of George Eliot. She 
would doubtless have preferred Positivism to have 
remained a controlling philosophy without its ecclesi- 
astical development; just as Martineau wished to 
restrain Unitarian thinkers from uniting in a Uni- 
tarian denomination. But the universal tendency 
of abstract religious thought is inevitably towards out- 
ward ritual organization ; and an attempt to free re- 
ligious thought from the narrowness of sect resulted 
in the addition of a new sect with thoughts unfreed. 
Ideas, with George Eliot, were " strong agents " be- 

1 To those who are curious to learn how such new teaching as George 
Eliot's and George Macdonald's affect a pronounced " Evangelical " 
mind, it might be interesting to consult ' The Religion of our Litera- 
ture,' by George McCrie. Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1875. 



Her Religion and Philosophy 169 

cause taken in a " solvent of feeling." " The great 
world-struggle of developing thought is continually 
foreshadowed in the struggle of the affections, seeking 
justification for hope and love." Like her Romola, 
she distrusted "phantoms and disjointed whispers in 
a world where there was the large music of reasonable 
speech and the warm grasp of living hands." Yet in 
the classical chapter in which Romola faces her lot 
and decides to leave Tito, the memory of the interview 
with her dying brother is thrust upon her, and she 
longs to understand the experience which guided his 
life, and which gave " a new sisterhood " [mark the 
word of fellowship] to the wasted face. This memory 
blends with that of Savonarola offering himself in the 
Duomo as a sacrifice for the people, and makes her 
thirst for these waters " at which men drank and found 
strength in the desert." She saw no visions herself, 
as " she sat weary in the darkness." " Revealed re- 
ligion " was not revealed to her. 



No radiant angel came across the gloom with a clear 
message for her. In those times, as now, there were human 
beings who never saw angels or heard perfectly clear mes- 
sages. Such truth as came to them was brought confusedly 
in the voices and deeds of men not at all like the seraphs of 
unfailing wing and piercing vision — men who believed fal- 
sities as well as truths, and did the wrong as well as the 
right. The helping hands stretched out to them were the 
hands of men who stumbled and often saw dimly, so that 
these beings unvisited by angels had no other choice than 
to grasp that stumbling guidance along the path of reliance 
and action, which is the path of life, or else to pause in 
loneliness and disbelief, which is no path, but the arrest of 
inaction and death. 



\jo George Eliot 

Inaction to George Eliot meant death, because it 
meant a selfish loneliness; and although the guid- 
ance was stumbling, it was along the path of life. 
The radiant visions of a transcendental faith were not 
hers, but hers was the "precious seeing" — "that 
bathing of all objects in a solemnity as of a sunset 
glow, which is begotten of a loving, reverent emotion." 
Although the choir invisible to her meant a very dif- 
ferent thing from what was understood by the writer 
of " . . . the King eternal, immortal, invisible," it is a 
fine choir and it sings true. Non omnis moriar, she 
cries, even though I go down to dusty death, and 
worms eat me. "The memory of the just shall live," 
is the key-note of her ' Jubal.' What if the new race 
knew him not on his return? They were singing his 
music: what was he to that? She says at the con- 
clusion of her ' Death of Moses ' : 

He has no tomb. 

He dwells not with you dead, but lives as law. 

When Armgart's voice fails her, and her whole world 
— the world of art — is destroyed, she contemplates 
suicide. Walpurga, standing for the vast army of 
human beings outside that world, tells her that al- 
though her career in song is ended, she is not therefore 
sunk to such moral penury as that. 

Noble rebellion lifts a common load, 
But what is he who flings his own load off 
And leaves his fellows toiling 1 Rebel's right ? 
Say rather, the deserter's. 

Then Armgart, slowly awakening to the realization 
that there may be pain around her beside her own, 
complains that if there were one near her now suffer- 



Her Religion and Philosophy 171 

ing like herself and needing her for comfort, it would 
be worth while for her to live. 

WALPURGA 

One, near you ? why, they throng ! you hardly stir 

But your act touches them. We touch afar. 

For did not swarthy slaves of yesterday 

Leap in their bondage at the Hebrews' flight, 

Which touched them through the thrice millennial dark ? 

But you can find the sufferer you need 

With touch less subtle. 

ARMGART 

Who has need of me ? 

WALPURGA 

Love finds the need it fills . . . 

So Positivism, like Christianity, sets its face against 
suicide, — another illustration of the fact that this 
system is but the morality of Christianity. You may 
partake of the largesse of nature, yet be paupers of 
grace. Grace holds, though nature fails. 

She is remorseless where the morale is at stake, as is 
seen in her treatment of Savonarola, and in her unan- 
swerable position against Young and Cumming. And 
she had a direct hand in removing the prevailing 
pietistic notion that right actions should be performed 
on earth because of rewards laid up in heaven.^ " That 

1 As an indication of this changed feeling, it is interesting to note 
that the latest revised hymnal of the Episcopal church omits the 
hymn ' For the Apostle's glorious company,' the last stanza of which 
is : 

For martyrs who with rapture-kindled eye, 
Saw the bright croww descending from the sky. 
And died to grasp it, Thee we glorify. 

This was hymn i86 of the previous edition. The reason given for the 
omission by one of the bishops of the committee of revision is that 
the idea of suffering the death of martyrdom in order to grasp even a 
heavenly crown is an idea unworthy of a virile Christianity. 



1/2 George Eliot 

is the path wc all like," she says — and her picture of 
Maggie here contains a reminiscent hint of her own 
girlhood — "that is the path we all like when we set 
out on our abandonment of egoism — the path of 
martyrdom and endurance, where the palm-branches 
grow, rather than the steep highway of tolerance, just 
allowance, and self-blame, where there are no leafy 
honors to be gathered and worn." 

But it is of the utmost importance to separate the 
record of her personal religious beliefs, as recorded 
in her diary and letters, — not intended for publication, 
— from the artistic work of her fictions : we must 
judge her from that latter absolutely, and not relatively 
from the other. In the letter to Dr. Allbut quoted 
by Oscar Browning,^ she says : "You must perceive 
the bent of my mind is conservative rather than de- 
structive, and that denial has been wrung from me by 
hard experience — not adopted as a pleasant rebellion. 
Still, I see clearly that we ought, each of us, not to 
sit down and wail, but to be heroic and constructive, 
if possible, like the strong souls who lived before, as 
in other cases of religious decay." Her genius was 
utterly opposed to all attacks upon vital current be- 
lief; not only because it was vital, and therefore min- 
istering to the public good, but because, even though 
she could not sympathize intellectually with all its 
developments, she would not hurt those who loved 
and trusted her.^ This is why she would not write 

^ ' Life of George Eliot,' by Oscar Browning. Walter Scott, Lon- 
don, 1890, p. 119. 

2 " Pray don't ever ask me again not to rob a man of his religious 
belief, as if you thought my mind tended to such robljery. I have 
too profound a conviction of the efficacy that lies in all sincere faith, 
and the spiritual blight that comes with no-faith, to have any nega- 



Her Religion and Philosophy 173 

reviews after the awakening of her creative nature. 
She had to do with humanity, which means the whole 
man, including the heart; reviewing was too apt to 
overlook the heart in the concentration of its gaze 
upon the head. She wished to be a religious writer 
because she wished to help the whole man ; and only 

tive propagandism in me. I have very little sympathy with Free- 
thinkers as a class, and have lost all interest in mere antagonism to 
religious doctrines. I care only to know, if possible, the lasting 
meaning that lies in all religious doctrine from the beginning till 
now." — Letter to Madame llodichon, ' Life,' vol. ii., p. 343. 

" All the great religions of the world, historically considered, are 
rightly the objects of deep reverence and sympathy — they are the 
record of spiritual struggles which are the types of our own. This is 
to me pre-eminently true of Hebrewism and Christianity, on which my 
own youth was nourished. And in this sense I have no antagonism 
towards any religious belief, but a strong outflow of sympathy. Every 
community met to worship the highest Good (which is understood to 
be expressed by God) carries me along in its main current; and if 
there were not reasons against my following such an inclination, I 
should go to church or chapel constantly, for the sake of the delight- 
ful emotions of fellowship which come over me in religious assem- 
blies — the very nature of such assemblies being the recognition of a 
binding belief or spiritual law, which is to lift us into willing obedience, 
and save us from the slavery of unregulated passion or imjjulse. 
And with regard to other people, it seems to me that those who have 
no definite conviction which constitutes a protesting faith, may often 
more beneficially cherish the good within them and be better members 
of society by a conformity based on the recognizerl good in the public 
belief, than by a non-conformity which has nothing l)ut negatives to 
utter. Not, of course, if the conformity would be accompanied by a 
consciousness of hypocrisy. That is a question for the individual 
conscience to settle. But there is enough to be said on the different 
points of view from which conformity may be regarded, to hinder a 
ready judgment against those who continue to conform after ceasing 
to believe in the ordinary sense, liut with the utmost largeness of 
allowance for the difficulty of deciding in special cases, it must remain 
true that the highest lot is to have definite beliefs about which you feel 
that ' necessity is laid upon you ' to declare them, as something better 
which you are bound to try and give to those who have the worse." — 
Letter to Mr. Cross, ' Life,' vol. iii., p. 216. 



174 George Eliot 

in fiction can art and morality come together for such 
a purpose. The sadness of her novels is not, indeed, 
because of a loss of " Evangelical " faith. She felt, in 
common with all conscientious well-wishers and hard 
workers for an improved, the burden of an unimproved, 
humanity, and she felt it more intensely than most. 
It was largely an impersonal burden that she bore — 
the burden of Nineveh, the burden of the world — and 
it was calculated to enforce profoundly sober tones. 
So far as mere gloom is concerned, no portion of her 
life, as revealed in her letters, is so full of shadow as 
that early part of it which felt the torture of the Cal- 
vinistic screws. There is a general uplifting of spirit 
and an increasing serenity of vision as that period 
retrogresses. While she does not wear her religion 
like a prophylactic ring, her agnosticism is not mili- 
tant, like Huxley's ; and it appears in the novels only 
on the side which is the negative side of Christianity. 
She recognized with a satisfying fulness that philo- 
sophical intolerance is more repugnant than religious 
intolerance, and her hard raps are for the sects of 
thought, and not the sects of faith .^ She always ac- 

1 " As to the necessary combinations through which life is mani- 
fested, which seem to present themselves to you asahideous fatalism 
which ought logically to petrify your volition, — have they, in fact, 
any such influence on your ordinary course of action in the primary 
affairs of your existence as a human, social, domestic creature ? And 
if they don't hinder you from taking measures for a bath, without 
which you know that you cannot secure the delicate cleanliness which 
is your second nature, why should they hinder you from a line of re- 
solve in a higher strain of duty to your ideal, both for yourself and 
others ? But the consideration of molecular physics is not the direct 
ground of human love and moral action, any more than it is the direct 
means of composing a noble picture or of enjoying great music. One 
might as well hope to dissect one's own body, and be merry in doing 
it, as take molecular physics (in which you must banish from your 



Her Religion and Philosophy 175 

knovvledged the mystery that lay " under the proc- 
esses." Her soul abhorred all negative propaganda ; 
and she did not engage in that worst of futilities of 
making her opinions mark time with her religion, 
because her opinions were her religion. 

Indeed, if we had to construct her religious posi- 
tion solely from the internal evidence of her fiction, 
— which is really all we do have to do, — we should 
place her faith in a personal God several degrees 
higher than we know it was, from the external evi- 
dence, so careful was she not to intrude metaphysical 
dogma into the place of moral sympathy. Mr. Myers 
has pictured in burning colors his impressions of her 
convictions as he walked with her, one evening, in 
the Fellows garden at Trinity, listening to her terribly 
earnest utterances as to the inconceivability of God 
and immortality, and the peremptory and absolute 
need of duty: 

Never, perhaps, have sterner accents affirmed the sover- 
eignty of impersonal and unrecompensing Law. I listened, 
and night fell ; her grave, majestic countenance turned 

field of view what is specifically human) to be your dominant guide, 
your determiner of motives, in what is solely human. That every 
study has its bearing on every other is true; but pain and relief, love 
and sorrow, have their peculiar history which make an experience 
and knowledge over and above the swing of atoms." — Letter to the 
Hon. Mrs. Ponsonby, ' Life,' vol. iii., p. 245. 

" I should urge you to consider your early religious experience as 
a portion of valid knowledge, and to cherish its emotional results in 
relation to objects and ideas which are either substitutes or metamor- 
phoses of the earlier. And I think we must not take every great 
physicist — or other ' ist ' —for an apostle, but be ready to suspect 
him of some crudity concerning relations that lie outside his special 
studies, if his exposition strands us on results that seem to stultify the 
most ardent massive experience of mankind, and hem up the best 
part of our feelings in stagnation." — lb., vol. iii., p. 253. 



176 George Eliot 

towards me like a sibyl's in the gloom ; it was as though she 
removed from my grasp, one by one, the two scrolls of 
promise, and left me the third scroll only, awful with inevi- 
table fates. And when we stood at length and parted, amid 
that columnar circuit of the forest trees, beneath the last twi- 
light of starless skies, I seemed to be gazing like Titus at 
Jerusalem on vacant seats and empty halls ; in a sanctuary 
with no Presence to hallow it, and a heaven left lonely 
of a God.^ 

Yet this was not the talk of her books. There are 
no positive negations there. She had no controversy 
with faith, and she longed to satisfy " the need of 
those who want a reason for living in the absence of 
what has been called consolatory belief." So far as 
she had herself to reckon with, she regarded " reli- 
gious exercises " as a kind of opium which she re- 
fused to take, preferring wide-awake pain to a 
drugged unconsciousness. But she frankly acknowl- 
edges that " there must be limits or negations " in 
her experience which may screen from her " many 
possibilities of blessedness for our suffering human 
nature." Where faith did not reconcile with reason, 
she saw not faith, but unreason ; and " as a strong 
body struggles against fumes with the more violence 
when they begin to be stifling, a strong soul struggles 
against phantasies with all the more alarmed energy 
when they threaten to govern in the place of thought." 
And this discriminating power was of service in re- 
straining her from that implicit acquiescence in the 
marvels of those modern " isms " and " ologies " 
which have wrecked more credulous souls of high 
intelligence. Her analytical tendency is sometimes 

1 Century Magazine^ vol. xxiii., p. 62. 



Her Religion and Philosophy 177 

her misfortune, but her letter to Mrs. Stowe is an 
indication of its beneficent side : 



Perhaps I am inclined, under the influence of the facts, 
physiological and psychological, which have been gathered 
of late years, to give larger place to the interpretation of 
vision-seeing as subjective than the Professor would ap- 
prove. It seems difficult to limit — at least to limit with 
any precision — the possibility of confounding sense by im- 
pressions, derived from inward conditions, with those which 
are directly dependent on external stimulus. In fact, the 
division between within and without in this sense seems to 
become every year a more subtle and bewildering problem. 

Your experience with the planchette is amazing ; but that 
the words which you found it to have written were dic- 
tated by the spirit of Charlotte Bronte is to me (whether 
rightly or not) so enormously improbable that I could 
only accept it if every condition was laid bare, and every 
other explanation demonstrated to be impossible. If it 
were another spirit aping Charlotte Bronte, — if here and 
there at rare spots and among people of a certain tempera- 
ment, or even at many spots and among people of all 
temperaments, tricksy spirits are liable to rise as a sort of 
earth-bubbles and set furniture in movement, and tell things 
which we either know already or should be as well without 
knowing, — I must frankly confess that I have but a feeble 
interest in these doings, feeling my life very short for the 
supreme and awful revelations of a more orderly and intel- 
ligible kind, which I shall die with an imperfect knowledge 
of. If there were miserable spirits whom we could help, 
then I think we should pause and have patience with their 
trivial-mindedness ; but otherwise I don't feel bound to 
study them more than I am bound to study the special 
follies of a particular phase of human society. Others, who 
feel differently, and are attracted towards this study, are 

12 



178 George Eliot 

making an experiment for us as to whether anything better 
than bewilderment can come of it. At present, it seems to 
me that to rest any fundamental part of religion on such a 
basis is a melancholy misguidance of men's minds from the 
true sources of high and pure emotion.^ 

So little ground did she give for ofifence to the 
" little ones " that a reviewer in the Westminster,, 
after her death, makes complaint that her art caused 
her to sympathize unduly with the old creeds, con- 
sidering her abandonment of Christian dogma, and 
that the claims of the new creed and the new life 
were not directly recognized at all. But she did all 
she could do as an artist, both positively for the old 
beliefs and negatively for the new. Indeed, the most 
adverse criticisms of her art have been based on what 
has been taken as its didactic subservience to her mor- 
ality ; and it is subservient in the sense that the music of 
a mass is subservient to the idea of worship. She 
admires Sir Christopher Cheverel for the virility of his 
art enthusiasms, which places them on a moral plane. 

" An obstinate, crotchety man," said his neighbors. But 
I, who have seen Cheverel Manor as he bequeathed it to his 
heirs, rather attribute that unswerving architectural purpose 
of his, conceived and carried out through long years of 
systematic personal exertion, to something of the fervor of 
genius, as well as inflexibility of will ; and in walking through 
those rooms, with their splendid ceilings and their meagre 
furniture, which tell how all the spare money had been ab- 
sorbed before personal comfort was thought of, I have felt 
that there dwelt in this old English baronet some of that 
sublime spirit which distinguishes art from luxury, and wor- 
ships beauty apart from self-indulgence. 

1 ' Life,' vol. iii., pp. 160 seq. See also a former letter to Mrs. 
Stowe, on the same subject, ' Life,' vol. iii., pp. 92 seq. 



Her Religion and Philosophy 179 

She could not have formed new religions, in justice 
to her reiterated pleas for faithfulness to the old 
ideals. For while it is true that there is in her life 
a sad lack of that peculiar humility of the simple 
Christian which makes the wise things of the world 
foolish, there is nevertheless a saving modesty which 
prevents her rashness from running the full length of 
out-and-out Free Thinking. 

I dislike extremely a passage in which you appear to 
consider the disregard of individuals as a lofty condition of 
mind. My own experience and development deepen every 
day my conviction that our moral progress may be measured 
by the degree in which we sympathize with individual suffer- 
ing and individual joy. The fact that in the scheme of 
things we see a constant and tremendous sacrifice of indi- 
viduals is, it seems to me, only one of the many proofs that 
urge upon us our total inability to find in our own natures 
a key to the divine mystery. I could more readily turn 
Christian, and worship Jesus again, than embrace a Theism 
which professes to explain the proceedings of God.^ 

She saw that a rationalistic creed is a contradictory 
impossibility; that rationalism is possible, and that a 
creed is possible, but not the two in combination. 
" Hopes," indeed, " have precarious life," 

" But faithfulness can feed on suffering, 
And knows no disappointment." 

And duty is the residuum. We see it through a 
light magnified by religion, because all of George 
Eliot's religion is in it. What makes the moral phi- 
losophies so spiritually dull is the mechanical divorce 
of religion from morality generally to be discovered 
1 Letter to Charles Bray, ' Life,' vol. i., p. 472. 



i8o George Eliot 

in them, as though the two belonged to separate 
spheres. George EHot's morahty shines with a bril- 
liance cast from Christianity. It is as a light perme- 
ating cathedral glass. That pale worker in the study 
bends not the knee in the adjoining minster, but the 
glow of the minster's window fills the workshop. 
When 'Felix Holt' appeared, a writer in a religious 
periodical exclaimed : " Felix's religious system, it 
seems to us, borrows everything from Christianity 
except its creed, and is represented as fulfilling the 
commands of the Beatitudes without looking for their 
blessing." That is true, and had George Eliot read 
it, she would have been pleased with her infringement 
of the rule against the reading of reviews. 

She does not always see duty in the soft raiment 
belonging to kings* houses. She stands at times 
under the thunder-scarred tops of tall Sinais, and lies 
prone on desert sands as the storm hurtles by. The 
black tempest of Maggie's great temptation was thus 
pierced by the white light of moral truth. " A great 
terror was upon her, as if she were ever and anon seeing 
where she stood, by great flashes of lightning, and then 
again stretched forth her hands in the darkness." ^ 

1 The comparison which is sometimes found between George Eliot 
and Lucretius is not really a comparison, but a contrast. He was con- 
cerned with causes ; she, with laws. He " denied divinely the divine ; " 
in George Eliot's fiction there is not even the religious denial of re- 
ligion. Revelation, if we come to the final analysis, has no place in 
the scope of phenomena viewed as working in the domain of law; and 
as George Eliot confines our human vision to that universe as the one 
most easily comprehensible, her religious influence is greater than it 
would have been had she been moved by " orthodox " zeal to impose a 
revelation upon her art, to explain supernaturally what, in art, may 
better be explained naturally. The Christian reader is quite capable 
of seeing the supernatural back of the natural, and working through 
it ; for he believes that God is in law as well as that He is the cause 
of it. 



Her Religion and Philosophy i 8 1 

Apart from ironical usage, and such places where 
one would naturally expect it, as in Tryan's talks with 
Janet, Dinah's exhortations, and Savonarola's preach- 
ing, the word ' sin ' occurs less than a dozen times in 
her novels, and not once, I believe, in her two latest 
works. Taken together, George Eliot's full definition 
of the " exceeding sinfulness of sin " is something like 
this: Sin is the incurrence of a necessity for deceit, 
and the cause of suffering. And so diffusive is that 
suffering that even justice becomes a retribution 
spreading " beyond its mark in pulsations of un- 
merited pain." It is a lie against the truth of nature, 
and is therefore unnatural. It is a lie against the 
wise order of the universe, and its result is therefore 
disorder and discordant unhappiness. It is what 
makes that hard crust around the soul which can 
be pierced by no pitying voice. It is the cold damp 
vault where despair abides, and where the morning 
sun and sweet pure air are not felt. It is vain personal 
regrets indulged in to the harm of helpful activities. If 
it aims at particular concrete things, particular con- 
crete consequences will follow. It is not a mere 
" question of doctrine and inward penitence." Its 
incorporate past will rise in unmanageable solidity be- 
fore the eyes of the present. It is the reverse and 
the denial of the need of the prayer — 

Give me no light, great heaven, but such as turns 

To energy of human fellowship. 

No powers save the growing heritage 

That makes completer manhood. ^ 

And on its border-land you are " harassed by assaults 
from the other side of the boundary." 

^ The motto of ' The Lifted Veil,' ' Life,' vol. iii., p. 195. 



1 82 George Eliot 

Now, is not this what theologians tell us the sin 
against the Holy Ghost is? Ought we not to be 
satisfied with it? It is just as much a Psalm of Life 
as Longfellow's, although it lacks the Christian tele- 
ology. Her grand Nemesis, with the swords in her 
hands, is as the faces which rise unbidden in the 
night; and in the solemn watches we hear the stifled 
cries. She echoes her sister poet's thought: 

There 's not a crime 
But takes its proper change out still in crime, 
If once rung on the counter of this world. 

And she construes crime to be every aim that ends 
with self. In spite of all the subtle efforts of Bulstrode 
to hide his past, that past rose before him at the mo- 
ment when he thought himself the most secure ; and 
when Arthur Donnithorne flattered himself that all 
was smooth sailing at last, the storm of his — as he 
foolishly thought forgotten — sin drove him a wreck 
upon the rocks. Her sinners are holden by the cords 
of their sins : it is as if they were in the clutch of 
some great sea-monster. She echoes the Scriptural 
emphasis that your sins will find you out. They rise 
incarnate in her novels and cry for vengeance, even 
as Baldassare rose across the sight of the dying Tito, 
and as the sin of Gwendolen in marrying Grandcourt 
rose before her in terrifying visions after his death, 
which she had — can there be any doubt of it? — 
caused.^ 

^ Here, again, may be seen the greater fulness of Christianity, in 
that its doctrine of hell is but the Nemesis continued into future con- 
ditions, and arranged for such as fail to have their sins found out in 
this present life. We see that in many cases sins do not find out the 
living sinner, and yet we are told that our sins will find us out; so if 
not here, then somewhere else. What is hell but Nemesis ? This is 



Her Religion and Philosophy 183 

Nor is she one of those fine Chateaubriands she 
makes FeHx ridicule, who are forever shooting in the 
air. " Your dunce who can't do his sums has always 
a taste for the infinite. Sir, do you know what a 
rhomboid is? Oh, no, I don't value these things with 
limits." Whatever her hand found to do, she did 
it with might. Felix sees through Harold's gener- 
alities about a bridge being a good thing to make, 
though half the men working at it are rogues. 

"Oh, yes!" said Felix, scornfully; "give me a handful 
of generalities and analogies, and I '11 undertake to justify 
Burke and Hare, and prove them benefactors of their species. 
I '11 tolerate no nuisances but such as I can't help ; and the 
question now is, not whether we can do away with all the 
nuisances in the world, but with a particular nuisance under 
our noses." 

It is this readiness to do^ when once moved by 
genuine conviction that he ought to do, that saves 
Deronda. A little too much swaying between the 
infinite Good and the finite realization of that Good in 
himself would have ruined the character. He could 
very easily have been made one of those " large " souls 
who are ridiculous in a working-day world. As it is, 
he may not be considered a success from the " hust- 
ler's " standpoint ; but there are other points of view 
than the commercial traveller's, highly important as 
those doubtless are. When Deronda is called, he 
answers ; and the largeness and vagueness of the 
scheme makes the obedience all the more laudable ; 

not a doctrinal treatise, and I am not arguing for " orthodoxy." I have 
no mental conception of the quality or of the duration of future pun- 
ishment, and I think it a waste of time to theorize about it. I merely 
wish to emphasize, in passing, the incompleteness of Positivism as 
compared with the rounded fulness of Christianity, 



184 George Eliot 

for, although we think it a mistake, he was willing to 
risk a probable failure in the light of a clear duty ; 
which is the point at issue. We must look at it from 
his standpoint, not from ours. He was, at the last, 
" practical," although engaged in an impracticable 
scheme ; and was so from the first, in the best sense 
of the word, because he acted in accordance with the 
promptings of a chivalric nature which did not allow 
itself to be confused by the every-day standards of 
" Society," nor, on the other hand, to be twisted into 
quixotic shape by too great a rebound from those 
standards. He is a combination of honor and com- 
mon-sense ; and if there was a fight on between him 
and Grandcourt, I should bet on Deronda. 



XII 

This feeling for the immediate good is strangely, 
and yet logically, mixed with a feeling for heredity. 
For distance is not measurable by time, but by radi- 
cal differences in affinity; and ancestral claims are 
binding because they feed the feeling for and nourish 
the habit of a close filial reverence : they feed it and 
are therefore its parents. The indignation of Romola 
is against the treachery to her father's memory. A 
reconstructed Presence is to move in the old places, 
and it is as much a real Presence to the devout imag- 
ination as the actual presence was before to the visual 
eye. We are a part of it, bone of its bone, and it 
rules us from the grave. 

George Eliot pushes the doctrine to its furthest 
limits. Squire Cass was hardly a man to inspire an 
affectionate memory ; yet Nancy preserved *' sacredly 
in a place of honor" the rehcs of her husband's de- 



Her Religion and Philosophy 185 

parted father, — a kind of Chinese worship, you see. 
It was the call from Jewish blood to Jewish blood that 
stirred the pulses of Deronda, although the author, 
foreseeing a difficulty there, turned her hero around 
his hard corner by making him fall in love with a 
Jewess ; and not only that, but the sister of the man 
who put such an impossible burden upon him. 

Without doubt, her theories of heredity are the 
direct result of her biological reading with Lewes; 
she extending, as is her wont, to the psychical the 
known laws of the physical. The solidarity of man- 
kind may be preserved in its healthful order only by 
each unit keeping true to its intimate units ; and what 
so intimate as the family? This is the theme of 
' The Spanish Gypsy.' Silva is dominated by his 
past, by the " mystery of his Spanish blood ; " and 
the attempted escape from this dominion makes the 
tragedy. His sudden killing of Zarca is explainable 
only by the reassertion of this rule, because there was 
nothing but hate between him and the Prior, whose 
death he was nevertheless thus moved to revenge. 
In leaving his place he disturbed — 

. . . the rich heritage 
Of nations fathered by a mighty past, — 

a past which was a chambered Nautilus of memo- 
ries, each linked with each in binding chains. Why, 
the very breeze and the breath of the sea are charged 
with them, for she chiefly thinks of the Mediterranean 
as " the Mid-sea which moans with memories." 

Still further, the actual catastrophe is brought 
about by what some would say was an act of treach- 
ery; and yet fair warning was given to Silva that, 
under certain conditions, the secret would not be 



I 86 George Eliot 

kept. These conditions were that if Sephardo, a 
Jew, could benefit his ozvn people by using the secret 
in their behalf, he would not fail to do so. Loyalty 
to his kindred overrode loyalty to the trusting Silva, 
and the tragedy ensued. 

Zarca is the embodiment of the contrast to Silva. 
He is the true unit remaining in its place. The 
grandeur of the conception is colossal. The inefface- 
able memory of the past is all the more resurgent 
because it is a past of doom, despised and excommu- 
nicate ; and by this past he calls Fedalma to her 
proper future, which she must tread " with naked 
bleeding feet," a future perhaps like the past — 

Where no man praised it and where no church blessed. 

For my part, my sympathies are with Silva. The 
claims of heredity may be stretched too far. Some- 
thing is due to the present as such, and the demands 
of the past may become too shadowy to be effectual. 
The tendency to variation under conditions of en- 
vironment is as natural as the hereditary principle. 
There may be historic sympathy without historic 
rightness; and issue must be taken with "that 
Supreme, the irreversible Past." The past may 
be irreversible, but it is not perforce supreme, and 
if really dead, let it, in God's name, bury its dead. 
We feel that Fedalma is justified in her outburst 
against her father: 

Stay! never utter it ! 
If it can part my lot from his whose love 
Has chosen me. Talk not of oaths, of birth, 
Of men as numerous as the dim white stars, — 
As cold and distant too, for my heart's pulse. 



Her Religion and Philosophy 187 

No! 
I belong to him who loves me — whom I love — 
Who chose me — whom I chose — to whom I pledged 
A woman's truth. And that is nature too, 
Issuing a tresher law than laws of birth. 

But, aside from this, the ethics of brotherhood are 
the only saving ethics. They teach that a wrong 
against another is an injury to society, to that vast 
solidarity which through all its vastness feels the 
shock of every evil deed, and trembles with delight 
at each impact of good. George Eliot's paper in 
' Theophrastus' — ' Moral Swindlers ' — illuminates the 
needful lesson that a man's moral stature is not to be 
taken simply by his home life ; that he may be a 
faithful husband and a tender father, and yet a bad 
public man, and effect more harm through his public 
misdeeds than another man of high civic virtue but 
of loose personal habits. She widens the view and 
the nomenclature of morality, and entirely removes it 
from the narrow limits in which that word is usually 
confined. She says of her imaginary Florentine in 
the Proem to ' Romola,' " He felt the evils of his time, 
for he was a man of public spirit, and public spirit 
can never be wholly immoral, since its essence is care 
for a common good." 



XIII 

And it is time to say that the emphasis she lays 
upon the wrong done to others by the careless as- 
sumption of unauthorized relations between the sexes 
is not the result of remorse at any false step of her 
own ; but is intended to mark the difference between 



1 88 George Eliot 

such relationships and her own, as she conceived this 
difference. That she erred, many believe who at the 
same time absolve her in their minds from all con- 
scious wrong-doing; the barrier between her and 
George Sand is as the barrier between day and night. 
Feuerbach says, in the work George Eliot translated : 
" That alone is a religious marriage which is a true 
marriage, which corresponds to the essence of 
marriage-love." And she says of Jane Eyre, " All self- 
sacrifice is good, but one would like it to be in a some- 
what nobler cause than that of a diabolical law which 
chains a man, soul and body, to a putrefying carcass," 
— a vitally interesting opinion, because it not only 
marks a clear distinction between George Eliot and 
Charlotte Bronte, but also because she considered 
Rochester's excuse as valid as her own. 

The question is not so simple as some have sup- 
posed. The non-existence of the divorce court in 
1854 was not the legal barrier to marriage between 
Lewes and Miss Evans, because that court requires 
conditions which could not have been complied with 
by the suing party. But her action was nevertheless 
a protest against what she thought was cruelly unjust 
legislation, or, rather, a cruel lack of just legislation. 
It is fair to assume that there was more of impulse in 
the step than she was conscious of. It is the same 
Marian Evans who at various stages repudiates music 
and gives up going to church with a suddenness that 
could not avoid a collision with her father. She does 
not appear to have blamed herself for this conflict be- 
tween personal conviction and filial affection beyond 
the mere regret that it should have occurred; nor is 
there any self-blame evident for her union with Lewes, 
although, as we have seen, there is an ever-wakeful 



Her Religion and Philosophy 189 

desire to differentiate such a union from loose and 
immoral connections. It is the same Miss Evans who 
surrendered Miss Lewis for Hennell's ' Inquiry,' — nay, 
who gave up an imperfect conception of Jesus Christ 
for an imperfect conception of Mr, Bray; and who 
did it with joy. Her character had developed, but 
her temperament had not changed. 

Yet she would have warmly repudiated the charge 
that she had violated the sacramental nature of mar- 
riage in her union with a man whose wife was living; 
and she would have done so on the ground that while 
he was at one time joined to that wife by a solemn 
moral obligation, such an obligation had ceased to 
exist, and that the true marriage, after that cessation, 
was with her, Marian Evans. She did not violate a 
home, for there was no longer any home. Mr. 
Lewes' sons took the same view, and always called 
her "mother." She took the deepest interest in their 
welfare, and Charles, the only surviving son of George 
Lewes, became her heir.^ Her view was that her act 
was against the social law accidentally in force at that 
time, but not against the fundamental idea of a sacred 
marriage tie; and she never wavered from that view. 
Lewes was always to her her " husband," and she 
insisted that her friends must so consider the relation- 
ship, or cease to be her friends. 

No author has dwelt with fuller force on the bind- 
ing relations of the marriage tie, notwithstanding this 
living protest against what she deemed an unjust law. 

She who willingly lifts up the veil of her married life has 
profaned it from a sanctuary into a vulgar place. 

1 Leslie Stephen : article ' Lewes,' Dictionary of National Biog- 
raphy. 



190 George Eliot 

" Marriage is so unlike everything else. There is some- 
thing even awful in the nearness it brings. Even if we 
loved some one else better than — than those we were 
married to, it would be no use " — poor Dorothea, in her 
palpitating anxiety, could only seize her language brokenly 
— "I mean, marriage drinks up all our power of giving or 
getting any blessedness in that sort of love. I know it may 
be very dear, but it murders our marriage — and the 
marriage stays with us like a murder — and everything else 
is gone." 

She paused. There was something else to be stripped 
away from her belonging to that past on which she was 
going to turn her back forever. She put her thumb and 
her forefinger to her betrothal ring ; but they rested there 
without drawing it off. Romola's mind had been rushing 
with an impetuous current towards this act for which she 
was preparing : the act of quitting a husband who had dis- 
appointed all her trust ; the act of breaking an outward tie 
that no longer represented the inward bond of love. But 
that force of outward symbols by which our active life is 
knit together so as to make an inexorable external identity 
for us, not to be shaken by our wavering consciousness, 
gave a strange effect to this simple movement towards tak- 
ing off herring, — a movement which was but a small 
sequence of her energetic resolution. It brought a vague 
but arresting sense that she was somehow violently rending 
her life in two, — a presentiment that the strong impulse 
which had seemed to exclude doubt and make her path 
clear might after all be blindness, and that there was some- 
thing in human bonds which must prevent them from being 
broken with the breaking of illusions. 

Romola went home and sat alone through the sultry hours 
of that day with the heavy certainty that her lot was un- 
changed. She was thrown back again on the conflict 



Her Religion and Philosophy 191 

between the demands of an outward law which she recog- 
nized as a widely ramifying obligation and the demands 
of inner moral facts which were becoming more and more 
peremptory. She had drunk in deeply the spirit of that 
teaching by which Savonarola had urged her to return to 
her place. She felt that the sanctity attached to all close 
relations, and therefore pre-eminently to the closest, was 
but the expression in outward law of that result towards 
which all human goodness and nobleness must spontane- 
ously tend ; that the light abandonment of ties, whether 
inherited or voluntary, because they had ceased to be 
pleasant, was the uprooting of social and personal virtue. 



She enforces her views by putting her favorite 
Romola into the wrong in fleeing from Tito, notwith- 
standing her great provocations, and by putting the 
rebuke on the lips of such a one as Savonarola. 
She is not free, he tells her, for she is a debtor. She 
owes the debt of a wife and of a Florentine woman. 
She has no right of choice. She is fleeing from the 
presence of God into the wilderness. How will she 
find good ? " It is not a thing of choice ; it is a river 
that flows from the foot of the Invisible Throne, and 
flows by the path of obedience." Man cannot choose 
his duties. Then comes that superb command of 
Savonarola to draw forth the crucifix she carries 
within her mantle. " There, my daughter, is the 
image of Supreme Offering made by Supreme Love, 
because the need of man was great." He bids her 
conform her life to that image, to make her sorrow 
an offering. And the heading of the first chapter in 
the next Book is " Romola in her Place!' 

The effect of the Christian teaching of Savonarola 
is so abiding with Romola that even when she dis- 



192 George Eliot 

covers facts which would undoubtedly warrant, in 
the eyes of our century, absolute divorce, she 
determines not to attempt a second time a clandestine 
escape, but to come to an agreement with Tito con- 
cerning a limited separation. And yet she feels 
that, though the law is sacred, " rebellion might be 
sacred, too ; " and she sees, in a flash, that her 
problem is essentially the same as Savonarola's, " the 
problem where the sacredness of obedience ended, 
and where the sacredness of rebellion began." So, 
when such an agreement with Tito as she had con- 
templated is found impossible, after her godfather's 
death, after the shock of the failure of her faith in 
Savonarola, when the burdens become unbearable, 
she flees again ; and this time there is no arresting 
voice, and no blame on the part of any reader. 

She questioned the justness of her own conclusions, of 
her own deeds : she had been rash, arrogant, always dis- 
satisfied that others were not good enough, while she her- 
self had not been true to what her soul had once recog- 
nized as the best. She began to condemn her flight : 
after all, it had been cowardly self-care ; the grounds on 
which Savonarola had once taken her back were truer, 
deeper than the grounds she had had for her second flight. 
How could she feel the needs of others and not feel above 
all the needs of the nearest? 

But then came reaction against self-reproach. The 
memory of her life with Tito, of the conditions which made 
their real union impossible, while their external union im- 
posed a set of false duties on her which were essentially 
the concealment and sanctioning of what her mind revolted 
from, told her that flight had been her only resource. All 
minds, except such as are delivered from doubt by dulness 
of sensibility, must be subject to this recurring conflict 



Her Religion and Philosophy 193 

where the many-twisted conditions of life have forbidden 
the fulfilment of a bond. For in strictness there is no re- 
placing of relations : the presence of the new does not 
nullify the failure and breach of the old. Life has lost its 
perfection : it has been maimed ; and until the wounds are 
quite scarred, conscience continually casts backward doubt- 
ing glances. 

We all know how the struggle ended. 

The only " separations " in her novels are the 
separations of spirits made bitter, but through their 
bitterness sublime, by the galling chains which fasten 
in marital faithfulness. Who ever than Lydgate, 
than Dorothea, better fulfilled the awful words of the 
service which bound them " for better, for worse " ? 
I do not know of any finer picture of a wife than the 
picture of Mrs. Bulstrode as she stands over the 
poor, beaten, irretrievably disgraced husband, and 
though ruined in his ruin, falling with his fall, her 
intense pride quenched in the quenched light of his, 
says to that broken idol, "Nicholas, look up ! " 

If we could only view it objectively, and apart 
from necessarily binding standards, we should have 
to acknowledge her union with Lewes as a true 
" inward " marriage. No two persons were ever more 
happily mated. While his critical suggestions may 
have occasionally interfered with the freest scope of 
her art, his acute cleverness yielded unquestioned 
acquiescence to all that was essential in her genius. 
It was, thus viewed, an ideal union, his mental 
sprightliness keying her to effort, and her moral 
earnestness stirring hitherto unawakened depths in 
him. He was her willing slave in every good sense. 
Each of her books acknowledged the indebtedness: 

13 



1 94 George Eliot 

each is dedicated, in terms of constant afifection, to 
her " husband." 

Her marriage to Mr. Cross did not indicate a 
change of view in regard to the importance of legaHty 
and regularity in the marriage bond, which, as we 
have seen, she emphasizes with power in her writ- 
ings, but merely that the union with Lewes would 
have been blessed by Church and State if she could 
have had it so. That it was not so blessed, she 
seems to say, was because of the cruel neglect of 
legislation, for which, in a more perfectly regulated 
State, room would be found, and to which neglect her 
" outward " conscience rose superior. It is the most 
positive proof in her career of the fallibility of any 
" outward " conscience which has not the universal 
sweep of exceptionless divine command, in the 
absence of which all other standards, however seem- 
ingly just, must clash. The result of her example 
demonstrates with convincing clearness the grand 
overtopping excellence of God-given over man- 
derived laws of conduct. The " outward " conscience 
does not, and never will, conform to any one rule in 
any two men unless it conform to one standard above 
them both, and beyond their human touch. It is not 
as if the divine law were a fetish, as if it were apart 
from all human understanding, to be followed blindly 
and sullenly by a frightened, awe-struck people; it is 
precisely the law, the only law, which the " outward " 
conscience represents. It ought not to be surprising 
that George Eliot failed to grasp that vital fact at the 
solemnest moment of her life, because the fact had 
passed, with the rest of her Christian belief, into the 
limbo of discarded faith. With her, it was not 
rebellion against God's law, because she did not 



Her Religion and Philosophy 195 

believe that the law was God's in that it did not con- 
form, in this given case, to the essential moral idea 
of God. She can only reason it out. The Christian's 
act of faith transcends reason. Not that the Christian 
is unsupported by reason, but the faith remains with 
those who lack the reason, and is supported by that 
which is above it. 

That is all, I believe, that can be said for her, and 
it is a good deal, because it is all that can be said for 
one who was guided by no low motives, and who 
could honestly justify her course to her conscience. 
Perhaps in the last analysis, one must qualify that 
word "honestly;" for she loved much, and love is a 
casuist. It is easier to formulate philosophy for 
others than to abide by it ourselves ; her Romola is 
truer than herself. But no genuine, generous student 
of her life ever for the smallest fraction of a second 
doubted her purity. It is hard for some to under- 
stand that because there is illegality there is not 
perforce an amour. Only once or twice did she 
break her silence in regard to this union, her letter 
to Mrs. Bray, soon after its formation, being intended 
as a sufficiently full explanation : 

If there is any one action or relation of my life which is, 
and always has been profoundly serious, it is my relation to 
Mr. Lewes. . . . Light and easily broken ties are what 
I neither desire theoretically nor could live for practi- 
cally. Women who are satisfied with such ties do not 
act as I have done. . . . From the majority of persons, 
of course, we never looked for anything but condemnation. 
We are leading no life of self-indulgence, except, indeed, 
that, being happy in each other, we find everything easy. 
We are working hard to provide for others better than we 



196 George Eliot 

provide for ourselves, and to fulfil every responsibility that 
lies upon us. Levity and pride would not be a sufficient 
basis for that." ^ 

And it speaks volumes for the recognition of her 
moral weight in the most thoughtful society of her 
country that its leaders — women as well as men — 
agreed to overlook the irregularity of the connection. 
It was not because of her genius, — at least, not 
because of that alone, for it is not presumable that 
the Rector of Lincoln and his wife, Mr. Goschen, 
Jowett of Balliol, the Hollands, would have received 
George Sand into their homes. 

We cannot justify her course, because we are 
Christians; we must account for it, for the same 
reason. 

XIV 

We have seen how she tries to understand the 
spirit of Dino's monasticism, but her sympathies are 
enraged at his abandonment of Bardo. That fine old 
pagan complains that his son's ideas ehcde argument. 
There is, indeed, something evasive in even the 
weakest forms of religion, before which even the 
strongest moral philosophy is helpless. And even a 
philosophy that implicitly denies a Christian immor- 
tality, " in moments high," when " space widens in 
the soul," will stand mute and wondering before the 
reaches of the soul into the life beyond. Although 
Dorothea had ceased to pray, she cries out to her 
dead husband, " Do you not see noiv that I could 
not submit my soul to yours? " 

1 ' Life,' vol. i., p. 327 seq. See her remarks on the Byron incident, 
' Life/ vol. iii., p. 100. 



Her Religion and Philosophy 197 

To sum up: was she a Christian? No, because 
she had lost faith in a personal Christ. Was she a 
theist? No, because, she had lost faith in a personal 
God. That is, No, to both these questions, as a phil- 
osopher; but — and this only concerns us — as a 
writer of fiction, Yes, for is she not the immortal 
creator of Mr. Tryan, whose memorial is his fervent 
faith? and of Savonarola, whose doctrine of submis- 
sion is the doctrine of all the blessed saints? and of 
Dinah, whose life is a sacrament? Was there a con- 
tradiction, therefore, between her private philosophy 
and her public work? Yes, because in the latter she 
was, like all creators, divinely possessed ; whereas 
philosophy is not creation, but reason; is not hot, 
but cold ; is not mystic, but positive, even though 
Positivism be negative ; has naught to do with the 
feelings, except as they are controlled by the intellect; 
is not, to conclude, sympathetic.^ Does her philo- 
sophical negation make her writings irreligious? No, 
because she does not allow her personal views to 
influence her art ; because she is all the more intensely 
religious by reason of her lack of religion ; because 
she finds more religion in life than many find life in 
religion ; because every positive word she has uttered 
is for Virtue and against Vice, is a shield for Truth, and 
against Deceit. Was she an optimist? No, she was 
too intellectually honest. Was she a pessimist .-' No, 

1 " My function is that of the cEsthetic, not the doctrinal teacher — 
the rousing of the nobler emotions, which make mankind desire the 
social right, not the prescribing of special measures, concerning 
which the artistic mind, however strongly moved by social sympathy, 
is often not the best judge. It is one thing to feel keenly for one's 
fellow-beings ; another to say, ' This step, and this alone, will be the 
best to take for the removal of particular calamities.' " — Letter to 
Mrs. Peter Taylor, ' Life ' vol. iii., p. 300. 



I 98 George Eliot 

she was too careful of others. What was she? She 
was a " mehorist," pierced by " that thorn-pressure 
which must come with the crowning of the Sorrowful 
Better because of the Worse." She was a moralist 
of the finest fibre. Her books are standards set on 
high for all men to follow in righteousness and true 
holiness. And although she occasionally writes from 
" Grief Castle on the River of Gloom, in the Valley 
of Dolour," she has a strong message of peace, of 
comfort, and of courage. 



B.— HER ART 



In the sphere of art, Wordsworth and Dante influ- 
enced her the most closely. 

We have so completely entered into Wordsworth's 
labors that his works do follow him as a matter of 
course in our undisputed basic conceptions of art; 
and it is only by an effort of the historic imagination 
that we can understand the revolutionary controversy 
their promulgation caused in the first year of the past 
century. All that he contended for was naturalness, 
and all that he contended against was its opposite. 
And where could naturalness have freer play than 
among people living in simple surroundings? 

If we agree with Wordsworth that humble incidents 
may be dignified in poetry by the imagination, and 
that their true dignity, in poetic diction, is not only 
not fitly expressed, but thoroughly spoiled by artifi- 
cially ornamental language, it follows that the thesis 
applies with more than equal force to prose. Words- 
worth's argument was in defence of a theory of poetry ; 
but as it was based on a theoretically accepted stand- 
ard of prose, its acceptance had the joyous result 
of improving the style of prose as well. The most 
exciting novels of incident, to-day, which are at the 
same time works of art, are, notwithstanding the 
spur they apply to the craving for the extraordinary, 
not therefore " gross and violent stimulants " such as 



200 George Eliot 

the " degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation " 
which, Wordsworth rightly charged, the taste of his 
day produced, one hundred years ago, in " frantic 
novels, sickly and stupid German tragedies, and del- 
uges of idle and extravagant stories in verse." 

Like Wordsworth, George Eliot strove to reproduce 
the emotional motive kindling her imagination, as 
opposed to the more vulgar method of arbitrarily 
choosing a theme, and working at it like a cobbler 
over a pair of shoes. Even in her " Evangelical " days 
she expresses her delight at meeting in Wordsworth 
so much of her own feeling; and this response she 
continued to enjoy throughout her life. 

The indebtedness to Dante is equally great, and for 
somewhat similar reasons. There is, in fact, a pecu- 
liar similarity between the Florentine and the English 
laureate in their veracious representations and their 
discriminating perceptions. Her study of the Italian 
poet was profound. In the powerful paper in ' Theo- 
phrastus ' directed against the false testimonials men 
give themselves for what is mistaken as a high imagina- 
tion, and what is, in reality, " a ready activity in fabri- 
cating extravagances such as are presented by fevered 
dreams," she calls Dante to witness that this supposed 
imaginativeness is nothing but confusion resulting from 
a defective perception. " These characteristics are 
the very opposite of such as yield a fine imagination, 
which is always based on a keen vision, a keen con- 
sciousness of what is, and carries the store of definite 
knowledge as material for the construction of its in- 
ward visions. Witness Dante, who is at once the 
most precise and homely in his reproduction of actual 
objects, and the most soaringly at large in his imagina- 
tive combinations." And witness herself also. 



Her Art 201 

Deronda, setting out to find Mirah's relatives, is, for 
a while, sickened by the coarse surroundings of his 
field: 

He went often rambling in those parts of London which 
are most inhabited by common Jews : he walked to the 
synagogues at times of service, he looked into shops, he ob- 
served faces, — a process not very promising of particular 
discovery. Why did he not address himself to an influential 
Rabbi or other member of a Jewish community, to consult 
on the chances of finding a mother named Cohen, with a 
son named Ezra, and a lost daughter named Mirah? He 
thought of doing so — after Christmas. The fact was, not- 
withstanding all his sense of poetry in common things, 
Deronda, where a keen personal interest was aroused, could 
not, more than the rest of us, continuously escape suffering 
from the pressure of that hard, unaccommodating Actual, 
which has never consulted our taste and is entirely unselect. 
Enthusiasm, we know, dwells at ease among ideas, tolerates 
garlic breathed in the middle ages, and sees no shabbiness 
in the official trappings of classic processions; it gets 
squeamish when ideals press upon it as something warmly 
incarnate, and can hardly face them without fainting. Lying 
dreamily in a boat, imagining oneself in quest of a beautiful 
maiden's relatives in Cordova elbowed by Jews in the time 
of Ibn-Gebirol, all the physical incidents can be borne with- 
out shock. Or if the scenery of St. Mary Axe and White- 
chapel were imaginatively transported to the borders of the 
Rhine at the end of the eleventh century, when in the ears 
listening for the signals of the Messiah, the Hep ! Hep ! 
Hep ! of the Crusaders came like the bay of bloodhounds ; 
and in the presence of those devilish missionaries with sword 
and firebrand the crouching figure of the reviled Jew turned 
round erect, heroic, flashing with sublime constancy in the 
face of torture and death — what would the dingy shops 



202 George Eliot 

and unbeautiful faces signify to the thrill of contemplative 
emotion? But the fervor of sympathy with which we con- 
template a grandiose martyrdom is feeble compared with 
the enthusiasm that keeps unslacked where there is no dan- 
ger, no challenge — nothing but impartial midday falling 
on commonplace, perhaps half-repulsive, objects which are 
really the beloved ideas made flesh. Here undoubtedly lies 
the chief poetic energy, — in the force of imagination that 
pierces or exalts the solid fact, instead of floating among 
cloud-pictures. To glory in a poetic vision of knowledge 
covering the whole earth, is an easier exercise of believing 
imagination than to see its beginning in newspaper placards, 
staring at you from a bridge beyond the corn-fields ; and it 
might well happen to most of us dainty people that we were 
in the thick of the battle of Armageddon without being aware 
of anything more than the annoyance of a little explosive 
smoke and struggling on the ground immediately about us. 

" Falsehood is so easy, truth so difficult," she says. 
She will draw no griffins with exaggerated claws and 
wings, but, if possible, a real unexaggerated lion. 
This is what she finds to admire " in many Dutch 
paintings which lofty-minded people despise," — this 
" precious quality of truthfulness." They are " faith- 
ful pictures of a monotonous homely existence," and 
therefore nearer the life of the majority than a life of 
exciting activity. 

Paint us an angel, if you can, with a floating velvet robe, 
and a face paled by the celestial light ; paint us yet oftener 
a Madonna, turning her mild face upward, and opening her 
arms to welcome the divine glory ; but do not impose upon 
us any aesthetic rules which shall banish from the region of 
Art those old women scraping carrots with their work-worn 
hands, those heavy clowns taking holiday in a dingy pot- 



Her Art 203 

house, those rounded backs and stupid, weather-beaten 
faces that have bent over the spade and done the rough 
work of the world, those homes with their tin pans, their 
brown pitchers, their rough curs, and their clusters of onions. 

And at the very time she was writing these words in 
' Adam Bede,' Millet, unknown to her, was starving in 
Barbizon ! It was as if he had heard her voice across 
the sea and strove to do her bidding. 

She carries out in her novels the principles she 
advocates in her essay on Riehl. She gives us pic- 
tures of true peasantry, as she claims, English painters 
do not, — such pictures as those of Teniers and Murillo. 
If our sympathies are to be expanded they must be 
based on realities, as when Wordsworth sings the 
reverie of * Poor Susan.' Falsification in art dealing 
with the life of the people is pernicious because it 
turns the attention away from a serious regard of their 
real joys and sorrows. What is wanted is a natural 
history of our social classes; and neither the doctrin- 
aire nor the dreamer can write it.^ 

The allusion in this essay to Dickens is most im- 
portant : 

We have one great novelist who is gifted with the utmost 
power of rendering the external traits of our town popu- 
lation ; and if he could give us their psychological character 
— their conceptions of life, and their emotions — with the 
same truth as their idiom and manners, his books would be 

1 The raw material of some of her after fiction may be found here. 
For example, she notes, in passing, Riehl's reference to the German 
peasants' inveterate habit of litigation, which has its parallel in Eng- 
land ; and which may have suggested Mr. Tulliver's lawsuit, although 
Mr. Tulliver would doubtless resent being classed with Dandie 
Dinmont ! 



204 George Eliot 

the greatest contribution Art has ever made to the awaken- 
ing of social sympathies. But while he can copy Mrs. 
Plornish's colloquial style with the delicate accuracy of a 
sun-picture, while there is the same startling inspiration in 
his description of the gestures and phrases of " Boots " as in 
the speeches of Shakspere's mobs or numskulls, he scarcely 
ever passes from the humorous and external to the emotional 
and tragic, without becoming as transcendent in his unreal- 
ity as he was a moment before in his artistic truthfulness. 
But for the precious salt of his humor, which compels him to 
reproduce external traits that serve, in some degree, as a 
corrective to his frequently false psychology, his preter- 
naturally virtuous poor children and artisans, his melodra- 
matic boatmen and courtesans, would be as noxious as 
Eugene Sue's idealized proletaires in encouraging the miser- 
able fallacy that high morality and refined sentiment can 
grow out of harsh social relations, ignorance, and want ; or 
that the working-classes are in a condition to enter at once 
into a millennial state of a/truism, wherein every one is car- 
ing for every one else, and no one for himself. ^ 

Everything false in Dickens is the opposite of some- 
thing true in George Eliot. The great humorist 
would have made much of the picture of Warner 
weaving on and on in his cabin, — would have made 
it a companion picture to his Madame Defarge, 
always knitting and seeing nothing. George Eliot, 

^ See also her review of ' Hard Times ' in the Belles-Lettres column 
of the Westminster, Oct., 1854, p. 604, in which remonstrance is recorded 
that the author neglected a rare opportunity to portray the inner life 
of the great labor movement in the north of England for the compara- 
tively unimportant exhibition of the evil effects of an education which 
subordinates the finer feelings to the intellect, — a system of education 
which existed only in Dickens's imagination. In this she unconsciously 
prognosticates her own great fame in ' Felix Holt.' 



Her Art 205 

whom I shall presently try to prove a finer humorist 
than Dickens, was too much occupied with the psy- 
chical Warner to linger on the pictorial. 



II 

No art can meet with a satisfying recognition that 
is not true to known conditions, — not, of necessity, 
experimentally known, but appealing to a universal 
intuitive apprehension. The best art is, therefore, 
that which meets the most readily with this recog- 
nition. It must be true to nature, as we say, and 
hold in check the tendency of the subjective bias to 
"improve," on an imperfect nature, — so imperfect 
that the compelling force of the art would seem to 
be the removal of the imperfections. The best art is 
the best imitation of an instinctively known nature ; 
and the subtlest appreciation of its display, in such a 
picture, for example, as the horror of Macbeth in the 
banquet scene, is shown, not by our exclamation, 
"How sublime!" but by our exclamation, "How 
natural ! " 

The judgments even of professional critics have been 
too often of the snap variety to pause at the word 
" unnatural," which has thus been rashly written down 
where the word " unusual " should have stood. If we 
can rightly say, " How unnatural ! " upon a work, that 
work, in the rightness of that criticism, is not a work 
of art, and cannot live. One would be the happy, or 
perhaps unhappy, possessor of an almost superhuman 
vision into the inter-relationship of cause and effect 
who could settle whether truth to nature is the result 
of a well-directed devotion to a moral purpose, or the 
power which moves the intelligence into framing the 



2o6 George Eliot 

moral concept into accord with a universal conscious- 
ness of right. The trueness of George Eliot's art will 
stand either test; and its convincing qualities are 
dubious only when the concept is emphasized with 
an enthusiasm which excludes a due consideration of 
the surrounding circumstances, which are thus felt 
not to be given their fairest play. Just as Words- 
worth failed to convince chiefly in the poems where 
he pushed his concept beyond the point of uni- 
versal intuitive recognition, so George Eliot failed 
only where some great doctrine absorbed her atten- 
tion with a too cruel insistence, as in her treatment 
of heredity in ' The Spanish Gypsy.' 

Even on such dangerous ground her general truth- 
fulness saves her from some of the errors she has 
been charged with. The Hebrew note in * Daniel 
Deronda ' has raised a chorus of dissent; and it is a 
little as if she had planned to arrange her scale with- 
out the use of accidentals. But let the unwary critic 
who standeth where George Eliot has slipped beware 
lest he fall where George Eliot stands firm. The 
scene between Deronda and his mother has been 
used as a part of the argument against the whole 
" unnatural " Jewish scheme ; yet in ' The Life and 
Writings of Isaac Disraeli' may be found a situation 
so nearly identical that one of two things is certain: 
either George Eliot used that situation representa- 
tively, or the creation of the situation in her book is 
an evidence of marvellous intuition into the possibili- 
ties of racial feeling. 

Except under this occasional dominance of a 
theory, she had that nice perception of fitness without 
which mere power remains ineffectual. If Romola 
seems to you cold, the impression is a correct re- 



Her Art 207 

flection of a finely true conception. She is made 
cold with a purpose ; nay, the author finds her cold, 
just as the miner finds his gold yellow. She is the 
embodiment of what is noblest in the Florentine 
spirit. Florence is a serious city — the city of Dante 
and Savonarola. The daughter of Bardo was brought 
up in the sternest austerity of the Stoic philosophy, 
and she fits into the ingenia acerrima Florentina which 
chilled Tito's warmly sensuous spirit: 

*' There is something grim and grave to me always about 
Florence," said Tito. . . . " and even in its merriment there 
is something shrill and hard — biting rather than gay." 

Ill 

Are there any really successful historical novels, 
with the subjective element in control? Does not 
the subjectivity control the history? It is a most 
intricate question, and it cannot be decided out of 
hand. Certain is it that the earnestness of one's 
study of a past era may not prepare one for its exact 
representation, and that the most conscientious effort 
to represent its spirit is apt to be tinctured with a 
modern spirit. Under a dominant idea, this possi- 
bility will become almost a certainty. But who can 
free one's self, when the working stuff of one's thought 
is the disjecta membra of moral philosophies, from 
injecting into a past what belongs to the present? 
And who shall say with certainty that a Florentine 
of the fifteenth century could not guide his life with 
some ethical method not so different, after all, from 
that of a later time? The fear of the Church, the 
dread of hell, the awards of heaven, are not enough 
to explain the Savonarola of history; and George 



2o8 George Eliot 

Eliot's explanation is at least not proven to be anti- 
historical. It knits us to a past when we are made to 
feel that the same grand purposes which rule us ruled 
it; and a conception is not damnable because it is a 
nineteenth-century exposition of a fifteenth-century 
fact, so long as the real exposition is hidden in the 
fall of years, and can be approximated only by a 
sympathetic imagination, which must be guided in 
some degree by the facts of the present. 

' Romola ' may be ' Middlemarch ' in ancient Flor- 
entine garb, but only in the nearness of a great 
moral idea which may have its forerunners in a 
previous age, though the manner of approach be 
different. At least two things which are apparent in 
all George Eliot's work are especially notable in this: 
a thorough preparation for her task, and a minute 
carefulness of detail in working it out. She con- 
ceived the idea of 'Romola' when in Florence in 
i860; and following the advice of the French bishop 
to his clergy to let a text rot in the mind before 
preaching from it, she let her imagination play on 
the concept for more than a year before putting pen 
to paper. The list of the books she read covers the 
complete bibliography of the period, and she read 
them in the original, — not only such writers as 
Villari and Sismondi, but Dante and Savonarola, 
Boccaccio and Politian. She made a study of the 
topography of Florence, and examined the costumes 
of the period in the British Museum. She put her- 
self in the way of acquiring the learned slang of a 
Renaissance city and the alley-talk of its mobs by 
reading ' La Mandragola ' (twice) and ' La Calandra,' 
— she whom her critics (how many of them, by the 
way, could read the originals whence sJie drew her 



Her Art 209 

colors?) charged with a lack of contemporaneousness. 
She said that she began * Romola' a young, and fin- 
ished it an old, woman, so terribly did it plough into 
her brain. ^ And whether anachronistic in motive or 
not, it contains none of the usual anachronisms which 
mar the historical novels which are the mere result 
of cramming. She reflects the actual forms of speech. 
The Italian characters always address Politian by his 
Italian name, although when she speaks it is ' Poli- 
tian.' She refers to Tito lifting his cap to Romola as 
an unusual sign of reverence at that time. A less 
careful writer, in describing the atrium of the Piazza 
deir Annunziata might — and probably would — 
have fallen into the error of including the surround- 
ing cloisters and the frescoes of del Sarto in the 
description, which George Eliot knows were not then 
existing. These are little things, but it is the pain- 
fully gathered mickle of detail that makes the muckle 
of a noble result. Right was thy judgment, O 
Strauss! — "et accurata et perspicua": "accuracy, 
the very soul of scholarship." ^ 

^ 'Life,' vol. ii., p. 352. See also Trollope's ' What I Remember,' 
chapter xxxv. 

^ To paint with authority such a character as Lydgate, she read, 
among other books, Renouard's ' History of Medicine,' Cullen's 
' Life,' Gall's ' Anatomy,' Carpenter's ' Comparative Physiology,* 
' Heroes of Medicine ; ' diversifying these studies with Nisard's ' His- 
tory of French Literature,' Drayton's ' Nymphidia,' Grote, Aris- 
tophanes, Theocritus, Owen, Plato, and ' Macbeth.' Before writing 
' Felix Holt ' she read Bamford's ' Passages from the Life of a Radi- 
cal,' Mill, Comte, Blackstone, English histories of the reign of George 
in., the 'Times' for 1832-3, and the Annual Register for 1S32. She 
read the Bible to get the proper tone for Lyon's talk, and consulted 
Mr. Harrison for law points. Jacobs says she must have read, before 
writing the Jewish chapters in ' Daniel Deronda,' Gratz's ' Geschicte 
der Judea,' in ten volumes, Jehuda Halevi, Spinoza, ' The Book of 
Light' (the Cabalistic Book) Sohar, and Maimonides- Was there 
ever another such .-' 

14 



21 o George Eliot 

I do not know that angels fear to tread where the 
Scotch dialect flourishes, — although I think they 
might, — but George Eliot refrains from rushing into 
those brambles. She describes and imitates only 
what she is wholly familiar with. She understands 
the speech of North Staffordshire and the neighbor- 
ing parts of Derby, and she does not hesitate to use 
it in * Adam Bede.' But she is not so sure of Scotch, 
and is filled with caution as she approaches it. " I 
think it was Mr. Craig's pedigree only that had the 
advantage of being Scotch, and not his bringing up, 
for except that he had a stronger burr in his accent, 
his speech differed little from that of the Loamshire 
people around him." It is well sometimes to beat 
the literary devil around the bush; and this is an 
instance not only of the cautiousness which accom- 
panies the scholarly habit of accuracy, but also of 
the honesty which rejects what is not strictly its 
own. We always feel, in reading George Eliot, that 
what she gives us is the genuine coin of the realm 
earned by hard work; the kind of confidence we feel 
in a doctor who has taken an honest degree. Even 
one who might dispute her theory would take without 
question her facts ; and a continued reliance upon 
the truthfulness of her perceptions gradually per- 
suades many to put credence in her moral system 
also. At all events, one is convinced that she has as 
much right, and the same kind of right, to talk about 
philosophy as Captain Marryat has to talk about the 
sea.^ 

^ What the critic of the Edinburgh Review said of ' Felix Holt ' 
may be said of all her works : " ' Felix Holt ' has some of the defects of 
ordinary novels, but ordinary novels have none of the merits of ' Felix 
Holt." " 



Her Art 211 

Just how much of an experimental knowledge is 
requisite for an artistic presentation of value is a ques- 
tion I will leave to the " nice geographers " whose 
objections to ' The Tempest ' are based on the general 
proposition that it is n't so. An intelligent cabinet- 
maker said, when ' Adam Bede ' appeared, that no- 
body but a cabinet-maker could have written it. It 
was the finest possible tribute to that accuracy of 
perception for which our author stood, but it was a 
cabinet-maker's criticism ; and to apply it in general 
would be to rob her of the divining-rod of genius — 
which is insight — and to place in her hand instead 
the reporter's detective camera. She did not have to 
frequent taverns to know what went on at the Rain- 
bow, and yet the Rainbow scene has been well called 
Shaksperean. 

There are indeed no portraits after the ' Clerical 
Scenes,' only hints and broken bits of portraiture. 
The persecution of Tryan was based on an actual 
occurrence, but the details were her own. The even- 
ing at Mordecai's club was undoubtedly suggested 
by a similar experience of Mr. Lewes, but there 
are philosophical alterations, for Lewes' man was 
a disciple of Spinoza, and Mordecai was his oppo- 
nent. She said in regard to * Adam Bede,' " There 
is not a single portrait in the book, nor will there 
be in any future book of mine." ^ Even in her 
dialect she aimed at giving a general physiognomy 
rather than a close portraiture; and one might wish 
that the Scotchmen could be prevailed upon to 
adopt the same liberal terms with their readers. 
To be general without generalizing; to be broad 

1 ' Life,' vol. ii., p. 117. 



212 George Eliot 

and generous, yet exact and true; to build a high 
tower of observation on a firm rock of knowledge, 
— that is art, and that is George Eliot. 



IV 

She is true, too, in those nuances of feeling which 
mark off one mode of life from another. She makes 
her gardener in ' Mr. Gilfil's Love Story ' find in 
the Gothic architecture something intelligible be- 
cause of its symbols drawn from his own profession. 

" Howiver, I '11 noot denay that the Goothic stayle 's 
prithy anoof, an' it 's woonderful how near them stoon-carvers 
cuts cot the shapes o' the pine-apples an' shamrucks an' 
looses. " 

When Adam Bede in his old age recalls the memory 
of Mr. Irwine's pastorship, he defends his lack of 
spirituality with similes drawn from his old trade 
of carpentry : 

" He did n't go into deep speritial experience ; and I 
know there 's a deal in a man's inward life as you can't 
measure by the square, and say do this and that 'U follow, 
and do that and this '11 follow." 

He is asked if Mr. Ryde did not preach more about 
the spiritual part of religion than Mr. Irwine. 

" Eh ! I knowna. He preached a deal about doctrines. 
But I 've seen pretty clear ever since I was a young un, as 
religion 's something else besides doctrines and notions. I 
look at it as if the doctrines were like finding names for 
your feelings so as you can talk of 'em when you 've never 



Her Art 213 

known 'em, just as a man may talk o' tools when he knows 
the names, though he 's never so much as seen 'em, still less 
handled 'em." 

And Mrs. Peyser's pleasure in seeing this same 
Mr. Irwine Sunday after Sunday is a part of that 
large general pleasure we all instinctively feel in a 
harmonious familiar picture. 

" It 's summat-Iike to see such a man as that i' the desk 
of a Sunday ! As I say to Poyser, it 's like looking at a full 
crop o' wheat or a pasture with a fine dairy o' cows in it ; it 
makes you think the world 's comfortable like." 

Mrs. Peyser's wit is not only rare, it is the native 
wit of a Staffordshire farmer's wife; and its rarity 
no more interferes with its nativeness than the su- 
perior quality of the Hall Farm cheeses interferes 
with the equally natural failures of the Britton es- 
tablishment near by. There is no humor in Mrs. 
Poyser's speech ; it is all wit. Because humor calls 
for reflective and deliberative characteristics absolutely 
uncharacteristic of Mrs. Poyser and her class. 

The " scorching sense of disgrace " which the Hall 
Farm felt at Hetty's fall is more severely voiced by 
Poyser than by his wife, to the surprise of a good 
many besides Mr. Irwine. People who relieve a 
nervous irritability by keen speech on trivial things 
are apt to be awed by the shadow of vital events, and 
the nervousness works off in a sympathy which enlists 
against all that affects the peace of the sufferer. Mrs. 
Poyser's silence is similar to that of Aunt Glegg, 
whose sharp tongue might be looked to for a vig- 
orous wagging against Maggie, instead of which it 
becomes Maggie's defender. 



214 George Eliot 

Caterina, in the hands of some latter-day and al- 
most all former-day novelists, would have been 
forced into suicide by the necessitous art of melo- 
drama. But George Eliot's art knows better, Cate- 
rina never thought of suicide. Her nature was too 
tender and too timid to allow her anger to settle into 
anything more active than mourning. This is the 
art " close to nature " because based on a knowledge 
of human nature. 

Perhaps the finest example of this wonderful cor- 
relation of her art to the standards of nature is the 
scene of the betrothal between Adam and Hetty. 
To call it ' The Betrothal,' as the author does in the 
heading to the chapter, is a part of the art, for it is a 
part of the evasive mockery of the human concrete 
conditions, which interfere with the realization of the 
divine abstract conditions, which we would like to 
make human. 



" I could afford to be married now, Hetty. I could 
make a wife comfortable ; but I shall never want to be 
married if you won't have me." 

Hetty looked up at him and smiled through her tears, 
as she had done to Arthur that first evening m the wood, 
when she thought he was not coming, and yet he came. 
It was a feebler relief, a feebler triumph she felt now, but 
the great dark eyes and the sweet lips were as beautiful as 
ever, perhaps more beautiful, for there was a more luxuri- 
ant womanliness about Hetty of late. Adam could hardly 
believe in the happiness of that moment. His right hand 
held her left, and he pressed her arm close against his heart 
as he leaned down towards her, 

" Do you really love me, Hetty? Will you be my own 
wife, to love and take care of as long as I live ? " 



Her Art 215 

Hetty did not speak, but Adam's face was very close to 
hers, and she put up her round cheek against his, Uke a 
kitten. She wanted to be caressed ; she wanted to feel as 
if Arthur were with her again. 

Hetty was not false to Adam ; she was simply true 
to herself. She was true to her nature, and Adam 
was true to his; and it was the truth of her feeling 
that was the deception of the truth of his. What 
more can art do? 



V 

One infallible sign of creative art is that it enters 
with enthusiasm into the subtleties of its creations. 
It does not follow that because there is enthusiasm 
there is genius. It may be that in the composition 
of ' Aurelian ' and ' Serapis ' their authors felt a glow 
they thought divine, but which seems to their readers 
but the heat of the midnight oil; and it might be 
supposed that George Eliot, who burned so much of 
this oil, would have suffered, too, from dimness of 
vision. She did not prepare for ' Romola,' how- 
ever, as the schoolboy prepares for an exam. The 
text rotted in her mind, and when she came to create 
she created with enthusiasm because she knew her 
substance, and was thrilled with joy whenever it re- 
vealed its possibilities ; just as an engineer, let us say, 
is delighted with each new manifestation of speed in 
the engine he has constructed. We are prepared for 
the note in her diary, " Killed Tito in great excite- 
ment." [Fancy, if you can, Mr, Ebers saying, " Killed 
Cambyses in great excitement,"] That reveals the 
Promethean spark, and strikes off ' Romola ' from the 



21 6 George Eliot 

historical novel class into a class not to be judged by 
the standards of mere accurate research. 

That she thoroughly enjoyed her dramatic situa- 
tions is shown by the fine outbursts with which she 
filled them. When the black marks become magical 
to Baldassare, as the moonlight falls on the page of 
Pausanias, which, an hour before, had suggested 
nothing to him, but which now conjured up a world, 
all the vibrations of memory are shocked into re- 
awakened activity, the chill of age falls away like a 
broken chain, and he is ready to shout with almost 
delirious delight in his new-found power. " The 
light was come again, mother of knowledge and Joy I " 
It is like a great crash of keys at the end of a Wag- 
nerian theme. 

VI 

Her essay moves in a broad, dignified style from a 
concept well thought out to its appropriate finish. 
We are taken into its secret at the start, and given a 
hint of the outcome early in its progress. Our minds 
are soon keyed to the proper pitch ; and the climax 
is, for the most part, legitimately reached. The style 
is like the angel of dawn described in the Proem to 
' Romola,' travelling with " broad slow wing." At its 
best it is a grand largo in open diapason. 

There is, it is true, an occasional anti-climax, as 
the reprieve of Hetty at the gallows, which an artist 
like Mr. Hardy, for example, would have avoided, as 
witness the end of ' Tess.' But that is out of regard 
for our feelings; and her Nemesis, awful as it is, is 
tempered with mercy. A realist is always in danger 
of extending a story to an end not demanded by its 



Her Art 217 

setting, but in agreement with some likely possibility 
of actual experience. It is quite natural that Adam 
should marry Dinah, but the real Finis is in the 
Stoniton jail. I cannot agree, however, with the 
opinion that the tragedy of Maggie and Tom should 
have been spared us. Maggie's life was a series of 
sacrifices. Her mistakes were all of the impulsive 
sort. The theme opened with a sister's love. It 
ends with that love, in a noble impulse, and in a 
crowning sacrifice. It is the deep-sounding return 
at the end of the symphony to its rich beginning. 
As for ' Deronda,' the question is not so easily set- 
tled ; but if the Hebrew note is true, the legitimate 
outcome is the wedding journey to the East ; and the 
anti-climax would have been reached only by a pic- 
ture of Daniel's experiences there. It would have 
been a little too much, though, to have asked us to 
look on at Mirah, sitting at a window in Jerusalem, 
with her little hands folded, waiting Deronda's return 
from his daily business of re-establishing the tempo- 
ral power of the Jews. And so far as the history of 
Gwendolen is concerned, which is vastly more impor- 
tant than the history of Deronda and Mirah, the end 
of the novel is true to life, for she has her spiritual 
awakening just as she is left alone to carry it out. 

At all events, George Eliot never relies on her 
climax to save her story, and that is the main point. 
She is a sensational writer in the right sense. She 
does not keep her climax up her sleeve. Her tenors 
do not expire singing high C's. There is seldom any 
straining for effect, and when the effect is terrible it 
is because it is natural. What Maggie wakens to on 
the boat with Stephen is " the plash of water against 
the vessel, and the sound of a footstep on the deck, 



21 8 George Eliot 

and the awful starlit sky." How could the Tearfulness 
of her position be better expressed, — the natural 
emphasizing the supernatural?^ 



VII 

A very bad name has gradually become attached to 
the idea of rhetoric. The art of persuasion is naturally 
the art of special pleading, and the mere beauty of 
language has been employed to dazzle the convic- 
tions. Words are weapons, and weapons may be used 
basely. Yet all living art must be rhetorical, — that is, 
it must persuade through the beauty of proportion, 
of temper, of form, of matter, of truth ; and fine 
thoughts deserve fine dress. The quarrel of literature 
with the rhetoricians is that they put poor thoughts 
in fine dress, like a kitchen wench decked with jewels. 
George Eliot is not afraid of large language. She 
has no nervous dread of having her rhetoric misun- 
derstood ; where the canvas requires splendor, she 
has the joy of the true artist in splashing it on. If 
you are to persuade a perverse generation that beauty 
is truth and truth is beauty, you must emphasize the 
truth by emphasizing the beauty. 

Pure rhetoric, indeed, is a simple thing: it is but 
the gold found by the touchstone, which little instru- 
ment has the equal power of rejecting all that is not 
gold, but looks like it. Descriptive strength of a high 
order is impossible without it; but the gifted artist 
uses it only to heighten an eft'ect which could not be 

^ The Introduction to ' Felix Holt ' is a microcosm of a large part 
of what is valuable in George Eliot, being an excellent example at 
once of her conservatism, her humor, her ethics, her pathos, and her 
method of germinating the plot. 



Her Art 219 

otherwise handled without loss of power. The differ- 
ence between a delicate water-color and a deep- 
toned encaustic is precisely the difference between 
the sketch of Dinah Morris at the opening of ' Adam 
Bede ' and the tragic coloring of Hetty towards its 
close : 

It was one of those faces that make one think of white 
flowers, with light touches of color on their pure petals. 

It was the same rounded, pouting, childish prettiness, 
but with all love and belief in love departed from it — the 
sadder for its beauty, like that wondrous Medusa-face, with 
the passionate passionless lips. 

Antithesis, which is perhaps the deadliest of rhetori- 
cal weapons, was easy to George Eliot, but she uses it 
sparingly on account of its inherent possibilities of 
misdirection. She is really a master of both epigram 
and aphorism, yet is not reckoned as an epigrammatic 
or aphoristic writer, because she conscientiously avoids 
dangerous ground. No English author save Shaks- 
pere is more quotable.^ There is hardly a field in reli- 
gion, philosophy, science, art, that she has not illumi- 
nated ; and yet in the application of her thought to any 
subject, it is observable that it is the solid worth of the 
thought that attracts rather than the glitter of the 
apothegm. An aphorism is often nothing more than 
a witty truism : what George Eliot contributes is truth, 

1 Some years ago I set out to make a George Eliot Calendar, the 
plan being to record the anniversary of some event of interest with 
each day, and fitting to that an appropriate quotation. Before finish- 
ing the work I found that I had a sufficient number of events to fill 
out calendars for three years — *. e., iioo slips — and this without any 
repetition; and that the quotations fitted into them with the greatest 
possible ease, with enough left over for still another year. 



2 20 George Eliot 

She enlarges the borders of thought more than she 
makes to glisten some thought already well defined- 
Like Dr. Holmes, who condemns certain lightnesses of 
speech, and yet shows that he can himself indulge in 
fooling like other mortals, by putting in the mouth 
of" the young fellow they call John " what he straight- 
way proceeds to punish in propria persona as the Au- 
tocrat, George Eliot shows herself capable of the 
epigram by putting it in the mouths of her witty char- 
acters ; it is for the most part confined to her dialogue. 
Take such a passage as — 

Under every guilty secret there is hidden a brood of 
guilty wishes, whose unwholesome infecting life is cher- 
ished by the darkness. The contaminating effect of deeds 
often lies less in the commission than in the consequent 
adjustment of our desires — the enlistment of our self-inter- 
est on the side of falsity ; as, on the other hand, the puri- 
fying influence of public confession springs from the fact 
that by it the hope in lies is forever swept away, and the 
soul recovers the noble attitude of simplicity. 

Rochefoucauld, it is certain, would have put that 
into the form of a maxim ; but she is too anxious not 
to be misunderstood on a subject of such weighty 
importance to crowd into an inch what can only be 
fairly stated in an ell. That brilliant Frenchman would 
have struck out the " most often " in George Eliot's 
sentence, " The touchstone by which men try us is most 
often their own vanity," thus increasing its proverb-like 
quality, but lowering its careful wisdom. She criti- 
cises Novalis, in ' The Mill on the Floss,' for his " ques- 
tionable" aphorism "Character is destiny," on the 
ground that it is not the whole of our destiny; and 
towards the close of the book she says: 



Her Art 221 

All people of broad, strong sense have an instinctive re- 
pugnance to the men of maxims ; because such people early 
discern that the mysterious complexity of our life is not to 
be embraced by maxims, and that to lace ourselves up in 
formulas of that sort is to repress all the divine promptings 
and inspirations that spring from growing insight and sym- 
pathy. And the man of maxims is the popular represen- 
tative of the minds that are guided in their moral judg- 
ment solely by general rules, thinking that these will lead 
them to justice by a ready-made patent method, without the 
trouble of exerting patience, discrimination, impartiality — 
without any care to assure themselves whether they have 
the insight that comes from a hardly earned estimate of 
temptation, or from a life vivid and intense enough to have 
created a wide fellow-feeling with all that is human. 

It is but another indication of her honesty. Her 
judgment is sound because it keeps always in view 
the wrongs possible through haste. Her wit does not 
blind her wisdom. 

Her style has no tricks. You may look in vain for 
traces of the alliterative habit, for example, in her prose 
work. She is content with the plain " said " in her re- 
ports of conversation, and never employs " remarked," 
" replied," "laughed," " smiled," " insinuated," like the 
novelists who seem to think it necessary to indicate in 
some such way the tone of the speech, which should be 
sufficiently clear from its body. She puts no tags on 
her tones; the dialogue explains them. I do not 
know that she was influenced by Thackeray, and 
she has left a record of her dislike to ' Esmond ;'i 
but her form is most at fault when it is Thackerayean, 
as in the opening paragraphs of the seventeenth 

1 ' Life,' vol. i., pp. 296 seq. But see, per contra, ' Life,' vol. ii., p. 351. 



22 2 George Eliot 

chapter of ' Adam Bede,' and the fourth paragraph 
of the ninth chapter of * Deronda; ' for although her 
style is as leisurely as one charged with feeling can 
be, it does not easily lend itself to the let-me-link-my- 
arm-in-yours-and-talk-it-over-as-we-saunter-dovvn-the- 
street method of the mighty satirist. A chorus is 
now and then a little tiresome. " Does it seem incon- 
gruous to you," she asks," that a Middlemarch surgeon 
should dream of himself as a discoverer? " No, no 
more incongruous that he should hail from Coventry 
than from London ; why ask? But this never became 
a mannerism, and was always prompted by a loving 
zeal to set an action or a character in just the right 
light. ^ 

" Nice distinctions are troublesome ; " she says in 
* Amos Barton.' " It is so much easier to say that 
a thing is black than to discriminate the peculiar 
shade of brown, blue, or green to which it really be- 
longs." The speech is figurative, with the point of 
the application in the plea for a careful judgment of 
character ; but it may be taken in its literal force as 
well. Remembering the reference to Dante in her 
' Theophrastus' essay, and her contention for the 
necessity of correct perceptions if we are to build a 
palace of delight which shall be something more than 
a pack of cards, a study of her fiction convinces one 
that she carried out in her own work what she com- 
mends in another's. She is almost always a clear writer. 
Her descriptions in her journal are a sufficient evi- 
dence of a keenly developed perceptive ability, en- 
couraged and fostered, no doubt, by her scientific 
investigations with Lewes. Among her recollections 
of the Scilly islands are their rectangular crevices, 
cubical boulders, oval basins. The easiest thing in 



Her Art 223 

the world to be hazy about is the precise form of a 
thing. This is why George Eliot is fine in minute 
dehneations : she knows the difiference between shapes, 
and can distinguish shades. She is not satisfied with 
telHng us that old Mrs. Dempster has beautiful white 
hair. The picture does not hang in that large gallery 
of our memory labelled " old ladies with beautiful 
white hair " : there is a special salon for it. She is 
separated from the other old ladies because her hair 
is " of that peculiar white which tells that the locks 
have once been blond." " You saw at a glance that 
she had been a mignonne blond." If we find this per- 
ceptive sharpness a little burdensome here and there 
as for instance, in — 

And the slow absent glance he cast around at the upper 
windows of the houses had neither more dissimulation in it, 
nor more ingenuousness, than belongs to a youthful well- 
opened eyelid with its unwearied breadth of gaze ; to per- 
fectly pellucid lenses; to the undimmed dark of a rich 
brown iris ; and to a pure cerulean-tinted angle of white- 
ness streaked with the delicate shadows of long eyelashes, 

it is perhaps because we are ourselves not trained to 
exact descriptions. 

I wonder how many " lovers of nature " can picture 
it with precise fidelity. It is the highest of gifts to 
have the power to reproduce a scene on paper and at 
the same time to make it poetical ; the rhetorical 
tendency will in most cases destroy the precision. 
The principal charm of Tolstoi to critical readers 
is his revolt from extravagant rhetoric to the plain 
truths of description; but the result may often be 
bareness, a puritanical exaggeration of the oppo- 
site of what was revolted from. George Eliot never 



2 24 George Eliot 

forgets that beauty belongs to art; that a scene in 
nature which has beauty must be beautifully repro- 
duced ; that the poetry of nature must be expressed 
poetically ; but with all this the saving truth that an 
exact description and a poetical description must go 
hand in hand, that the most exact is the most poeti- 
cal, and the most poetical the most exact. The very 
genius of Christmas burns in the words describing 
Tom's holidays ; the hoar spirit of old England floats 
through them, — aye, and of old Time, too. 

Fine old Christmas, with the snowy hair and ruddy face, 
had done his duty that year in the noblest fashion, and had 
set off his rich gifts of warmth and color with all the height- 
ening contrast of frost and snow. 

Snow lay on the croft and river-bank in undulations 
softer than the limbs of infancy ; it lay with the neatliest 
finished border on every sloping roof, making the dark-red 
gables stand out with a new depth of color : it weighed 
heavily on the laurels and fir-trees till it fell from them with 
a shuddering sound ; it clothed the rough turnip-field with 
whiteness, and made the sheep look like dark blotches ; the 
gates were all blocked up with the sloping drifts, and here 
and there a disregarded four-footed beast stood as if petrified 
" in unrecumbent sadness ; " there was no gleam, no 
shadow, for the heavens, too, were one still, pale cloud — 
no sound or motion in anything but the dark river, that 
flowed and moaned like an unresting sorrow. But old 
Christmas smiled as he laid this cruel-seeming spell on the 
outdoor world, for he meant to light up home with new 
brightness, and give a keener edge of delight to the warm 
fragrance of food : he meant to prepare a sweet imprison- 
ment that would strengthen the primitive fellowship of kin- 
dred, and make the sunshine of familiar human faces as 
welcome as the hidden day-star. 



Her Art 225 

The joy of winter, and also its pain, the hush of 
nature, the glow of the season, its mystery and its 
charm, are there; and yet the picture of the snow- 
covered fields is as realistically true to what we see 
every winter as its poetry is true to our inward loving 
sense. The sentiment does not warp the reality. It 
is a rare and notable gift. 

Ask the returned driving party what they have seen 
along the high-road, and you will be answered by a 
chorus of glittering generalities. " Such a lovely 
view ! " " Such a grand stretch of mountains ! " 
" Such beautiful wild flowers ! " " Such a wonderful 
lake!" Particularize they cannot; they do not re- 
member what they saw at certain points ; the result 
of the day's experience is a hazy, jumbled sense of 
pleasure, with a total absence of the specialized 
rational joy of the observer. But if George Eliot 
were of the party, and you had the power of drawing 
her out, she would tell you quietly, and in a corner 
by yourself: 

The ride . . . lay through a pretty bit of midland 
landscape, almost all meadows and pastures, with hedge- 
rows still allowed to grow in bushy beauty and to spread 
out coral fruit for the birds. Little details gave each field 
a particular physiognomy, dear to the eyes that have looked 
on them from childhood ; the pool in the corner where the 
grasses were dank and trees leaned whisperingly ; the 
great oak shadowing a bare place in mid-pasture ; the high 
bank where the ash-trees grew ; the sudden slope of the old 
marl-pit making a red background for the burdock ; the 
huddled roofs and ricks of the homestead without a trace- 
able way of approach ; the gray gate and fences against the 
depths of the bordering wood ; and the stray hovel, its old, old 
thatch full of mossy hills and valleys, with wondrous modu- 
li 



226 George Eliot 

lations of light and shadow, such as we travel far to see in 
later life, and see larger but not more beautiful. These are 
the things that make the gamut of joy in landscape to mid- 
land-bred souls — the things they toddled among, or perhaps 
learned by heart standing between their father's knees 
while he drove leisurely. 

It is not too much to say that the possession of 
this faculty made George Eliot a fine critic. I use 
the word advisedly. Her essays rank with Arnold's, 
as may be proved by comparing the article of each 
on Heine. Turn over the Belles-Lettres columns of 
the Westjninstcr from July, 1855, ^o October, 1856, 
and note with what insight and ready appreciation of 
merit, with what admiration for what is admirable, and 
with what skill at the detection of false notes the then 
obscure Miss Evans wrote those necessarily hurried 
reviews. That she refused to acknowledge them in 
her collected essays is merely another proof of that 
critical exclusiveness which would have nothing but 
the best perpetuated, and does not interfere with the 
enjoyment which their positive excellence carries to 
this day. I allude in another place to the interest 
attached to her critique of Hard Times ' discovered in 
these old files ; and, remembering the unjust remarks 
of Ruskin on her * Mill on the Floss,' it is worth while 
to notice that in her paper on ' Modern Painters,' ^ 
she employs a catholic breadth quite the opposite to 
her critic's prejudices. Her object, she maintains, — 
and it is the object of all her criticisms, — is to care 
more to know what the author says than what other 
people think he ought to say. She simply laughs at 
the peculiarly Ruskinian Preface, where the papal 

1 IVestminster Review, April, 1856. 



Her Art 227 

promulgation is uttered forth that the author is in- 
capable of falling into an illogical deduction. " We 
value a writer not in proportion to his freedom from 
faults, but in proportion to his positive excel- 
lences, — to the variety of thought he contributes 
and suggests, to the amount of gladdening and en- 
ergizing emotions he excites." She has the three es- 
sential characteristics of the fine essayist: penetration 
of vision, clearness of expression, sympathy of judg- 
ment.^ She told Kate Field that she wrote reviews 
because she knew too little of humanity; and the 
paper on Lecky was the only one composed after her 
creative period had set in. She left injunctions that no 
pieces printed by her prior to 1857 should be repub- 
lished,'"^ and she carefully revised all the work of her 
Westminster days the republication of which she sanc- 
tioned. This hesitancy about reviewing is a marked 
characteristic of our author, indicative as it is of her 
honorable caution about dealing with a subject which 
had, in all likelihood, not engrossed her attention with 

1 No student of her work ever joins in the usual dispraise of ' Theo- 
phrastus,' as that book carries us into her workshop, as it were, and 
we see the artificer surrounded by her tools. Each essay has a clearly 
defined end, which is pursued with vigor and humor ; and each essay 
contains also the germ of a story which, you feel, could be well worked 
out if the author had the time. Without 'Theophrastus ' we should 
not have the whole of George Eliot. It is folly to resent a book of 
essays from the pen of a novelist; concerning such things as are 
treated in ' Theophrastus,' the best novelist ought to make the best 
essayist, just as Salvini's papers on certain matters of the stage have 
a peculiar claim which the closest student of the drama who is never- 
theless not an actor could not possess. "A book," says Mr. Birrell, 
in one of his delightful touch-and-go papers, "which we were once 
assured well-nigh destroyed the reputation of its author, but which 
would certainly have established that of most living writers upon a 
surer foundation than they at present occupy." 

^ See Preface to ' Essays ' by Charles Lee Lewes. 



22 8 George Eliot 

the same force as it had the author's, and in her judg- 
ment of which, therefore, she was hable to err. And 
we have no reason to complain of the cessation of her 
essays, because that meant the continuation of her 
fiction, the blaze of which has dimmed our eyes 
to the earlier work. The criticisms must not be 
omitted, however, in any comprehensive review of 
her life. 

For the same reason, she would not read reviews 
of her own books ; which is an indication, in turn, of 
another interesting phenomenon, — a strength of will 
sufficient to cope with and subdue a natural curiosity. 
It takes character to deliberately shut one's eyes to 
what is printed about one. Think of George Eliot 
calmly refusing to read all criticisms,^ and then think 

1 George Eliot's prejudice, of course, was directed against the hope- 
lessly mistaken criticism which puts every creation of art into the 
Procrustean bed of a preconceived and obstinately maintained theory ; 
and which can never enter sympathetically into phases not experimen- 
tally known to its puny self. And yet her sense of humor might have 
been fed by some of the amusing stuff written of her work. The 
classification of Ladislaw as " a worthless Bohemian " would have 
been an offence in her nostrils ; and it puts the writer on the dry-as- 
dust plane of Casaubon without Casaubon's excuse. But the maga- 
zine which contains that hit-or-miss characterization also offers the 
profound suggestion that we acquiesce in Celia's marriage to a baronet 
because of our perhaps unconscious prejudice in favor of county 
families over tradespeople ; which prejudice explains why we view as 
a mesalliance the marriage of Rosamond to the grand-nephew of a 
baronet, although Celia is no better than Rosamond ! Here is sub- 
stance for mirth, and a little reading of this sort of thing would have 
done George Eliot no harm. 

The peculiarly feminine idea of tnission — not that all male authors 
are free from it — was intensified in her by a supersensitive dread that 
the message would be misunderstood ; and her fears could be removed, 
or at the best minimized, only by the loving care of her companion's 
censorship. Her tolerance did not include a welcome to the hostile 
reviewing of work she brought forth with pangs of honest labor. Her 
books were her children, and the critics were stepmothers. 



Her Art 229 

of Charlotte Bronte weeping over the Times brutah- 
ties at her pubhsher's breakfast-table ! 

This clearness condenses into a single happy word 
at times, which does duty for a sentence. There is a 
perfect picture in her metaphorical adjective describ- 
ing Casaubon's '^ sandy'' absorption of his wife's care. 
Fred Vincy is in the '^ pink-skmncd''' stage of typhoid 
fever ; in almost everybody's else hands he would 
have been " trembling on the verge " of it. A " violon- 
cello " voice is a novel inspiration for *' barytone," and 
a " chiaroscuro " parentage is a stroke of genius. 
The sense of Baldassare's weakness pressed on him 
like a ^^ frosty'' ache. Mr. Vincy's florid style is 
contrasted with the " Franciscan " tints of Bulstrode. 
" Ethereal chimes " is worthy of Charlotte Bronte. 
Her dramatic sense prompted the sure adjective at 
critical moments. As the French army approached 
Florence, the dark grandeur of the moving mass over- 
whelmed the onlookers with its " long-winding terrible 
pomp." And there is fine recklessness, suitable 
to a wild acceptance of the future as a result of a 
delirious pleasure in the present, in her " hell-brav- 
ing joy." 

She is not afraid to use a word usually stamped as 
vulgar if circumstances justify. "There was some- 
thing very fine in Lydgate's look just then, and any one 
might have been encouraged to bet on his achieve- 
ment." That is just the right word ; none other would 
do at all. She employs " kick " and " roast " in the 
same manner. She is fortunate in her choice of words 
with the prefix ?/;?, — as " unapplausive audience," 
" uncherishing years ; " although " unfecundated egg " 
is perhaps unnecessary, as the more recognizable 
" unfruitful " (she does not mean " unhatched ") 



230 George Eliot 

would have answered. " Otherworldliness " is not 
her invention, Lewes having used it in his ' History 
of Philosophy,' and, it may be, others before him. 

One has the frequent feeling, in reading George 
Eliot, that in this happy selective ability the one 
correct word is found to describe what must otherwise 
be described only by circumlocution, and that no 
synonym could have been used without weakening 
the picture. Mrs. Poyser's dairy is described as " a 
scene to sicken for with a sort of calenture " in hot 
and dusty streets. " Fever " would have been alto- 
gether too tame and too generalizing. If a cruel 
fate has ever kept you close to a stifling office through 
an oppressive summer, and if before your aching eye- 
balls have passed mocking visions of children playing 
in meadows, and wide ocean sweeps, then you know 
what a word in due season this " calenture " is, — that 
tropical delirium which drives sailors to hurl them- 
selves into the sea, which seems to them a grassy 
field. If you know your George Eliot, your sicken- 
ing for the country at such a season will be heightened 
by recollections of her " gleams and grecnth of sum- 
mer," What other word would so vividly represent 
the living green for which you long? " Verdure," 
after that, sounds almost as unreal as Mrs. Henry 
Wood's " pellucid tear of humanity." 

Her exactness is shown in such a description as 
" minim mammal," which is more scientifically precise 
than " most minute mammal." Mr. Chubb wore so 
much of the mazarine color of the Whig candidate at 
the Treby election that he looked like a very large 
*' gentianella." That flower is not so well known 
to most of us as the gentian, of the same family, 
and which other writers would have used in its 



Her Art 231 

place. But the gentian lacks the intense blue 
which the author meant to convey, and which no 
flower but the gentianella does convey, in connection 
with size. 

She is not a constant neologist, like De Quincey, 
and her invention of new, or employment of forgotten, 
words has not always the immediately appreciated 
value of that master, who uses " parvanimity " and 
" dyspathy" with a reason difficult to apply to George 
Eliot's " innutrient," with a choice already at hand 
between " innutritive " and " innutritious." She shares 
the rewards, however, as well as the penalties, of the 
fearless, as may be noted by the quotation of this 
sentence from her works in all the dictionaries, in 
illustration of the underscored word : " Has any one 
ever pinched into its piliilotis smallness the cobweb 
of prematrimonial acquaintanceship? " 

In her descriptions of the varying moods of nature, 
the functional power of the adjective is especially no- 
ticeable. A sky has that " woolly'' look which comes 
before snow. She speaks of the " dewy " starlight as 
a ''baptismal epoch. The still lanes on a bright 
spring day are filled with a " sacred silent beauty like 
that of fretted aisles." The snow falls from the laurels 
and fir trees with a " shnddcrmg" sound. (You see it 
falling, and then close your eyes to listen for the dear 
familiar sound.) Gwendolen was married on a " rimy" 
morning in November. The sunlight stealing through 
the boughs plays about Tito and Tessa " like a 
winged thing." 

These lyrical strokes are not all : the broad chest- 
notes of nature are sounded also. Surely it is as if 
Lablache were once more singing " In diesen heil'- 
gen Hallen " to hear 



232 George Eliot 

... the solemn glory of the afternoon, with its long 
swathes of light between the far-off rows of limes, whose 
shadows touched each other. 

And the spirit-music of Maggie in the Red Deeps 
listening " to the hum of insects, like the tiniest bell 
on the garment of Silence," and watching " the sun- 
light piercing the distant boughs as if to chase and 
drive home the truant heavenly blue of the wild 
hyacinths " comes, as it were, from the echo organ in 
the roof of some dim cathedral. 

Similes are made striking in George Eliot by the 
beautiful symmetry she discovers between the fact 
described and the corresponding fact in nature. 
Worldly faces at a funeral " have the same effect of 
grating incongruity as the sound of a coarse voice 
breaking the solemn silence of night." The rough 
brother in ' The Lifted Veil ' is lost to fine influences, 
which are as little felt by him " as the delicate white 
mist is felt by the rock it caresses." In the eloquent 
belief of Mordecai, the heritage of Israel lives in the 
veins of millions " as a power without understanding, 
like the morning exultation of herds." The rustle of 
the silk garments of the syndics on the pavement 
" could be heard like rain in the night." 

And how happy in her choice of names ! Adam 
Bede — the father of men, and the father of English 
history; suggesting original strength and primal 
power. We can see the red deep earth in her Loam- 
shire, and can feel the quivering slants of sunlight 
through the Red Deeps. We, too, are " in love with 
moistness," as we stand with George Eliot leaning 
over the bridge on the February afternoon on which 
Maggie's story opens. " How lovely the little river 



Her Art 233 

is, with its dark, changing wavelets ! It seems to me 
like a living companion while I wander along the 
banks and listen to its low, placid voice as to the voice 
of one who is deaf and loving," The little river is 
the Ripple, Fcdalma means " fidelity," and gives in a 
name the explanation of a character. The cold 
aristocracy of family glitters with the right frostiness 
in Grandcoiirt. One would have to think a long time 
before improving on such fine old Jewish names as 
Deronda, Charisi, Kalonymos ; and Casaiibon hints at 
scholarly seclusion. She was not afraid of novelty, 
either, because Gzvcndolen appears in ' Deronda ' for 
the first time in English fiction.^ 

VIII 

George Eliot was the reverse of a pedant. She 
had no regard for futile learning, as her treatment of 
Casaubon shows; and her seemingly pedantic use of 
scientific words, now and then, is but the accidental 
overflow of her vast reading. Luke, the miller, is 
" subdued by a general mealiness, like an auricula " 
■ — the fruit of her zoological studies by the seaside with 
Lewes. She makes " laches " stand for " negligence " 
(having Macaulay's authority there), and "^/^/^^/i?^ " 
for " liniment ;" ^^ prceterite " for " past," and " loobies " 
for the better known " gawks " or " lubbers." A type 
is spoken of as presenting a " brutish unmodifiable- 
ness." Jermyn wishes to " smoothen " the current of 
talk, which is unnecessarily Old English ; and " con- 
tradictiously " is grafted upon an obsolete adjective. 

1 It is possible that Mr. Kipling got a hint for a catching patro- 
nymic from the Mrs. Gadsby who is mentioned incidentally in ' Daniel 
Deronda ' as the yeomanry captain's wife ; just as his " That 's 
another story " was borrowed from Sterne. 



234 George Eliot 

But what is really the matter with the " dy^iamic " 
glance of Gwendolen, which has raised such a hubbub ? 
The word was seized with peculiar power at a time 
when electricity was revealing new possibilities of 
energy ; and the idea of force production, of a dis- 
turbed equilibrium, of energy not static but in active 
motion, could not be completely emphasized by any 
other term. Nor have we any quarrel with her 
" systole and diastole," either in ' Middlemarch,' when 
applied to rational conversation, or in ' Deronda,' 
when applied to blissful companionship. And who 
but a purist would object to the humorous dash she 
gives to the word " chancy y — her invention, I believe, 
in this significance of " untrustworthy" and which she 
used more than once, as, e. g., " By a roundabout 
course even a gentleman may make of himself a 
chancy personage." She forgets, once in a while, 
that her readers may not be as learned as herself; 
but this is a compliment which it is ungracious in us 
to fling back at her, — as much of a compliment as 
when she supposes us sufficiently acquainted with 
literature to accept without question her metaphors 
of" Laputan," " Mawworm," and " Harpagons." 

Even granting a needlessly complex term here and 
there, it is interesting to note how she herself pokes 
fun at those who use the same word without the same 
intelligence. She seems, for example, to be rather 
fond of " energumcn," and it may be that she wishes 
to defend its proper use in holding the editor of the 
Trumpet up to ridicule for playing with edged tools, 
which should be handled only by trained workmen: 

In a leading article of the Trumpet Keck character- 
ized Ladislaw's speech at a Reform meeting as " the 



Her Art 235 

violence of an energumen — a miserable effort to shroud 
in the brilliancy of fireworks the daring of irresponsible 
statements and the poverty of a knowledge which was of 
the cheapest and most recent description." "That was a 
rattling article yesterday, Keck," said Dr. Sprague, with 
sarcastic intentions. " But what is an energumen?" " Oh, 
a term that came up in the French Revolution," said Keck. 

Some of her seeming pedantry, indeed, is alto- 
gether humorous, as when she refers to Dempster's 
" preponderant occiput and closely clipped coronal 
surface," — a jesting glance back at the days when she 
discussed phrenology with Mr. Bray. Her Darwinian 
reading is shown in her reference to Molly carrying 
a large jug, two small mugs, and four drinking cans, 
all full, as an interesting example of the ** prehensile" 
power of the human hand, and in her jolly talk about 
Bob Jakin's big thumb — a "singularly broad specimen 
of that difference between the man and the monkey,'' 
And, just as we saw while considering her religion, a 
difference between her private views and her artistic 
expressions, so we find more pedantry in her letters 
to friends than in her novels. We need not ask 
which is the real George Eliot. There is always in 
letter-writing of the subjective sort an individualistic 
pressure which may easily turn the large language of 
generous art into a narrowing expediency. In view 
of her public work, however, there is no need to 
concentrate the gaze on such of her private letters 
as Mr. Cross has seen fit to select from the materials 
at his command. They are only a partial portrait; 
the full picture is the other. 

But what is most remarkable is that her trained 
skilfulness in the fields of investigation goes hand in 



236 George Eliot 

hand with the rapture of her most ethereal fancies. 
The same George Eliot who wrote — 

Certain seeds which are required to find a nidus for 
themselves under unfavorable circumstances have been 
supplied by nature with an apparatus of hooks, so that 
they will get a hold on very unreceptive surfaces. The 
spiritual seed which had been scattered over Mr. Tulliver 
had apparently been destitute of any corresponding pro- 
vision, and had slipped off to the winds again, from a total 
absence of hooks — 

could speak of an emotion passing over the face 
" like the spirit of a sob." 

Nobody denies her occasional obscurity. A good 
many readers have echoed to the heading to the 
opening chapter of * Daniel Deronda ' Dolfo Spini's 
perplexed cry, " It seems to me no clearer than the 
bottom of a sack," although George Eliot was under 
the double difficulty there of conveying a thought 
which should be the excuse for beginning a story 
just where she did — a very unusual place, namely, 
in the middle of it, serving her roast before her soup 
— and of conveying this in her favorite pastime of 
a style imitative of another author. " Moment-hand," 
in " His mind glanced over the girl-tragedies that are 
going on in the world hidden, unheeded, as if they 
were but tragedies of the copse or hedgerow, where 
the helpless drag wounded wings forsakenly, and 
streak the shadowed moss with the red moment-hand 
of their own death," has given commentators some 
trouble. But I am weak enough to think the sentence 
fine in its illustrative suggestion of unutterable pathos 
in the fate of tender human beings, so unheeded that 
it can only be likened to a shot bird in the forest, — 



Her Art 237 

its death a thing hidden from the great outside-world, 
and forgotten at the moment of its consummation. 

But there are no purposely invented Meredithian 
darknesses ; and meeting her obscurity, one has the 
sensation of inevitableness, not of teasing deceit. 
You guess that Browning is playing with you ; you 
know that George Eliot is not. 

And her friends must acknowledge that there is 
some dry reading in her fiction, as, for example, the 
chapter, ' A Learned Squabble ' in * Romola.' The 
talk of the Club in * Deronda ' is hard, but it has the 
value of a background to Mordecai's ideas, emphasiz- 
ing the tremendous odds against them. When she 
nods, it is over some deep learning, for she was a 
very learned woman. The dead languages were not 
dead to her. She could say with Tito that she had 
rested in the groves of Helicon and tasted of the 
fountain of Hippocrene. It was no slippered ease, 
with a pipe, a decanter, and an encyclopaedia within 
reach. It was not so much a desire for learning with 
her as it was a passion for knowledge. And it was a 
down-to-date knowledge. 

After waiting for the note to be carried to Mrs. Bulstrode, 
Lydgate rode away, forming no conjectures, in the first 
instance, about the history of Raffles, but rehearsing the 
whole argument, which had lately been much stirred by the 
publication of Dr. Ware's abundant experience in America, 
as to the right way of treating cases of alcoholic poisoning 
such as this. Lydgate, when abroad, had already been 
interested in this question. He was strongly convinced 
against the prevalent practice of allowing alcohol and 
persistently administered large doses of opium ; and he 
had repeatedly acted on this conviction with a favorable 
result. 



238 George Eliot 

She could say of herself, as Mordecai said of him- 
self: "I know the philosophies of this time and of 
other times; if I chose I could answer a summons 
before their tribunals." 

This profundity was not wholly due to her intellec- 
tual grasp, but was, it must be reiterated, in large 
part the result of her conscientiousness. She had 
what she says Mr. Stelling, Tom Tulliver's teacher, 
had not, a " a deep sense of the infinite issues 
belonging to every-day duties." The number of her 
volumes is not large. Seventeen years elapsed 
between ' Adam Bede' and ' Daniel Deronda,' and five 
years between her two latest fictions. For the same 
reason that she refused to write reviews after the 
beginning of her creative period, she declined her 
share of all those flattering proposals of publishers 
anxious for the appearance of great names on their 
advertisements. She said "no" to Macmillan's offer 
to write the * Shakspere ' for his ' Men of Letters ' 
series, although none could have done it better. 
She put up with Smith's offer of ^7,000, instead 
of the ;^io,ooo guaranteed for the publication of 
' Romola ' in Cornhill, because the acceptance of 
the larger sum would have necessitated a speed 
which she would not undertake in justice to the 
solemnity of her subject. And though she be- 
came rich through her works,^ she was herself an 

1 It is pleasant to know that she became a wealthy woman. There 
is no complete record of her earnings, but it is apparent that she was 
treated most generously by her publishers, whose vision was not 
narrowed to superfine distinctions existing between legal and ethical 
claims, but, on the contrary, was of such noble breadth that the two 
became merged. ;[^8oo were the stipulated terms for ' Adam Bede,' 
together with the copyright for four years. Later, Blackwood paid 
her, voluntarily, at different times, ^400 and ;^8oo, with the surrender 



Her Art 239 

example of Felix Holt's doctrine to put away the 
desire to be rich. ^ 

She takes her time in observing, and she observes 
thoroughly. Most tourists give half a day to Goethe's 
town; but compare the scholarly leisure of ' Three 
Months in Weimar' with the slap-dash, hit-or-miss 
reportorial speed of the special correspondent in ' The 
West from a Car Window' — not one town, but the 
whole West at sixty miiles an hour ! ^ 

IX 

The poetry of observation, of description, of nar- 
ration, is necessarily contained in a long-swinging 
line; and George Eliot adopts as her most uniform 

of the copyright. Altogether she probably received over $300,000 
from her works, and not less than $ioo,oco from the sale of ' Middle- 
march ' and 'Daniel Deronda ' alone. As indicative of the value of 
reputation, the Atlantic Jllouthly gs^we her ;i^300 for her poem, 'Agatha,' 
— an enormous sum for a piece which would probably have been 
returned, with the thanks of the editor, to any unknown or little- 
known writer. 

1 Charlotte Bronte cottid not write faster; George Eliot wotild r\ot. 

^ It is perhaps hardly necessary to say that she was, toto ccelo, 
removed from the blue stockings. After her intellectual revolt from 
evangelicalism we find her recording her detestation of the Hannah 
More type of woman, classifying it with singing mice and card-playing 
pigs. For " Woman's Rights " she has the most cutting of all 
contempts — the contempt of absolute silence. She would have been 
amazed at some of the later demands of the " new woman," and she 
would have shrunk from the publicity of many of its advocates ; for, 
with all her mental boldness, she was a timid, which is to say a true, 
woman. [Jowett wrote, on hearing of her death : " Elle etait flusfemme 
and had more feminine qualities than almost any woman I have ever 
known." 'Life and Letters of Benjamin Jowett,' vol. ii., p. 181.] Yet 
she always advocated any plan looking towards a real advance for 
her sex, favoring, for example, the petition that women should have 
legal rights to their own earnings and founding the George Henry 
Lewes studentship at Cambridge, for original research in physiology, 
for men and women. 



240 George Eliot 

verse the ten-syllabled heroic iambic metre. It is the 
metre of epic as well as of dramatic movement, — 
the metre of 'Paradise Lost' and the 'Task,' as of 
'Hamlet' and ' Tamburlaine.' She is really an epic 
poet, as the consideration of her largo prose might 
suggest, and she borrows the dramatic form merely 
for convenience. Critics have pointed out defective 
lines in 'The Spanish Gypsy;' but (although she 
had authority for purposely irregular verses^) to my 
mind its greatest defect is its uniformity, its continu- 
ous flow, its lack of irregularities. Marlowe's * Faust ' 
and Jonson's ' Alchemist ' — to take two examples of a 
dramatic poem — contain defective lines, but they 
occur in the passionate speech of the dramatis 
personcB, as if the thought were too impetuous to be 
confined within the limits of prosody; which was the 
feeling, doubtless, which led Shakspere to put some 
of his uncontrollably turbulent talk into prose. But 
the wild speech of Silva's final outburst against Zarca 
is as easy to scan (except for a false accent on the 
word " Zincalo," which she discovered later and apolo- 
gized for) as the most gently tempered descriptive 
passages. And yet, to do her full justice, much of 
Othello's madness is transcribed in even measures 
also. 

Ladislaw (in whom there is, perhaps quite uncon- 
sciously, a good deal of Lewes, and of whom George 
Eliot is very fond) defines in his swift way what 
poetry is: 

To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern that 
no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel that 
discernment is but a hand playing with finely ordered variety 

1 'Life,' vol. iii., p. 56. 



Her Art 241 

on the chords of emotion — a soul in which knowledge 
passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back 
as a new organ of knowledge. 

She does not precisely fulfil this definition herself, 
for her knowledge is too elaborately painstaking to 
pass mstantaneotisly from one state to another. She 
had the poetic insight to see what poetry is, but 
not the perfected gift of utterance to body forth its 
realization. The rapturous vision of faith is absent; 
and what we hardly missed in the prose we notice 
the omission of in the poetry. Compare her ' Jubal ' 
with Mrs. Browning's ' Seraphim : ' there is a Good 
Friday in her calendar, but no Easter Day. The 
apocalyptic flight is not necessary in prose fic- 
tion, but Positivism in poetry leadens the wings. 
The lyrics in ' The Spanish Gypsy ' are admirable 
imitations of correct forms, but lack the inspiration 
of the born lyrist. 

But here a general protest against the spirit of much 
modern criticism may perhaps safely be entered. 
A work of art is too often judged by an arbitrarily 
assumed standard. The particular book is fitted to the 
general rule, and found wanting or not wanting, as 
the case may be. If the rule is " Art for art's sake," 
and the book enforces certain moralities, it is con- 
demned on the plea that morality has no place in 
art. It is a green-grocer's parcel-tying style of 
criticism. We must come to our studies without 
prejudice if the result is to be chronicled without 
malice. A work of art is good or bad, not because 
it balances the scale on the other side of which is 
laid the weight of our theories, but because it ac- 
complishes or fails to accomplish what it sets out 

16 



242 George Eliot 

to do. Every such work has one aim — Beauty. 
It may be merely a physical, an objective, a ro- 
mantic beauty; or it may be moral beauty. Why 
should Handel be condemned because he is not 
Beethoven, and Strauss because he is not Handel? 
Great tragedians have essayed with success such 
characters as Petruchio and Benedick. One's en- 
joyment of Mr. Irving's Mathias does not conflict 
with the delight of his Jingle. Now, if Handel 
should compose a waltz, or Strauss attempt a Ninth 
Symphony ; if Booth should come from his grave 
to act Rip, or if Jefferson should put on the inky 
cloak of Hamlet, a large part of the critical world 
would say that the waltz ought to be left alone be- 
cause its composer had once written ' The Messiah ; ' 
that the symphony was beneath contempt because 
Strauss had hitherto done nothing but waltz ; that 
Booth and Hamlet were so inextricably mixed, the 
one with the other, that it was folly to ask us to con- 
centrate our attention on something new; and as for 
Jefferson, well, he must be crazy. But that is not 
criticism. There is no harm in comparisons, — nay, 
they are inevitable. But the final question must be 
— to return to our subject — not: Is George Eliot a 
failure in poetry because she is not a failure in prose; 
but, Does she accomplish her poetical purpose? And 
for the same reason, we do not say that George Eliot 
should never have written ' Middlemarch,' just be- 
cause she once wrote ' Silas Marner,' To be fair, we 
must judge ' Middlemarch ' positively, just as if Silas 
Marner' had never been written ; it stands, as does 
every work of art, of itself. It is more than unfair, 
and it is ungenerous, to ask for repetitions. When a 
writer like George Eliot ceases to produce Silas Mar- 



Her Art 243 

ners, it is a sign that she has passed beyond the con- 
trol of the genius which guided her through that 
stage into the control of another. She hath done 
what she could, in the past. Let there be no re- 
proach in our regret that it is past. 

The chief and final thing to ask of any poem, as of 
any prose work, is nobility of thought. In the long 
run we forget the imperfections of form and design, 
and remember only that ; as we recall at the close of 
a day's journey the beauties of the landscape, in the 
recollection of which all sordid features fade away. 
All the poets nod at times, — not only Homer. We 
forget the nodes of form in remembering the loops of 
thought. Ought we not to be a little ashamed of our- 
selves? Do we not, in our hypercritical moods, too 
often place ourselves where Felix Holt's scorn fairly 
reaches us? 

" It comes to the same thing ; thoughts, opinions, knowl- 
edge, are only a sensibility to facts and ideas. If I under- 
stand a geometrical problem, it is because I have a sensibility 
to the way in which lines and figures are related to each 
other ; and I want you to see that the creature who has the 
sensibilities that you call taste, and not the sensibilities that 
you call opinions, is simply a lower, prettier sort of being — 
an insect that notices the shaking of the table, but never 
notices the thunder." 

We spend too much time in talking about the type 
of a book, and not enough on what the type conveys 
to us. George Eliot may not be, technically, a poet, 
and she may not be, strictly speaking, a prose- 
poet. But she is a poet, nevertheless, in the broad 
sense of a possession of susceptibilities to poetic 



244 George Eliot 

emotion, and an endowment of imaginative creation 
in forms of eloquent beauty. The author of this was 
a poet: 

The grey day was dying gloriously, its western clouds 
all broken into narrowing purple strata before a wide-spread- 
ing saffron clearness, which in the sky had a monumental 
calm, but on the river, with its changing objects, was reflected 
as a luminous movement, the alternate flash of ripples or 
currents, the sudden glow of the brown sail, the passage of 
laden barges from blackness into color, making an active 
response to that brooding glory. 

Indeed, the whole character of Mordecai is poetically 
conceived and wrought; and she says, in one of the 
notes she left in her commonplace book, that the time 
we live in is " prosaic to one whose mind takes the 
prosaic stand in contemplating it; " implying that its 
real poetry may be sought for, as it was by Mordecai, 
away from its sordid meannesses. " Feeling is energy," 
she says ; and she is one of the priestesses of feeling, 
discharging her office through poetic energy. 

A great deal of ' The Spanish Gypsy ' will live, 
even though she did write poetry " with her left hand." 
It will live because of its inherent nobility of thought, 
or its pathetic beauty, or its melody, tuned to nature's 
tones, or to all these in combination ; such lines, for 
example, as — 

What times are little ? To the sentinel 
That hour is regal when he mounts on guard. 

The maimed form 
Of calmly joyous beauty, marble-limbed, 
Yet breathing with the thought that shaped its lips, 
Looks mild reproach from out its opened grave 



Her Art 

At creeds of terror; and the vine-wreathed god 

Rising, a stifled question from the silence, 

Fronts the pierced Image with the crown of thorns. 

But when they stripped him of his ornaments 
It was the bawbles lost their grace, not he. 

The bawbles were well gone. 
He stood the more a king when bared to man. 

I thought he rose 
From the dark place of long-imprisoned souls 
To say that Christ had never come to them. 

I thought his eyes 
Spoke not of hatred — seemed to say he bore 
The pain of those who never could be saved. 

He is of those 
Who steal the keys of snoring Destiny 
And make the prophets lie. 

Speech is but broken light upon the depth 
Of the unspoken. 

Say we fail ! 
We feed the high tradition of the world. 

The saints were cowards who stood by to see 
Christ crucified : they should have flung themselves 
Upon the Roman spears and died in vain, — 
The grandest death, to die in vain, — for love 
Greater than sways the forces of the world. 

O love, you were my crown. No other crown 
Is aught but thorns on my poor woman's brow. 

Can we believe that the dear dead are gone ? 
Love in sad weeds forgets the funeral day. 
Opens the chamber door and almost smiles, — 
Then sees the sunbeams pierce athwart the bed 
Where the pale face is not. 



245 



246 George Eliot 



Shall he sing to you? 
Some lay of afternoons, some ballad strain 
Of those who ached once but are sleeping now 
Under the sun-warmed flowers ? 

Juan, cease thy song. 
Our whimpering poesy and small-paced tunes 
Have no more utterance than the cricket's chirp 
For souls that carry heaven and hell within. 

Now awful Night, 
Ancestral mystery of mysteries, came down 
Past all the generations of the stars, 
And visited his soul. 

He could not grasp Night's black blank mystery, 
And wear it for a spiritual garb, creed-proof. 

Vengeance ! She does but sweep us with her skirts, — 
She takes large space, and lies, a baleful light 
Revolving with long years, sees children's children, 
Blights them in their prime. 

O great God ! 
What am I but a miserable brand 
Lit by mysterious wrath ! 

The deepest hunger of the faithful heart is faithfulness. 

New-urged by pain he turned away and went, 
Carrying forever with him what he fled — 
Her murdered love — her love, a dear wronged ghost 
Facins: him beauteous 'mid the throngs of hell. 



I said farewell : 



1 sam larev 
I stepped across the cracking earth and knew 
'T would yawn behind me. 



And these lines — 



Her Art 247 

Two angels guide 
The path of man, both aged and yet young, 
As angels are, ripening through endless years. 
On one he leans : some call her Memory, 
And some Tradition ; and her voice is sweet, 
With deep mysterious accords : the other, 
Floating above, holds down a lamp which streams 
A light divine and searching on the earth, 
Compelling eyes and footsteps. Memory yields, 
Yet clings with loving check and shines anew 
Reflecting all the rays of that bright lamp 
Our angel Reason holds. We had not walked 
But for Tradition ; we walk evermore 
To higher paths, by brightening Reason's lamp — 

have always reminded me, both in the swing of the 
verse, and in the contrasts between two clamorous de- 
mands, of the famous appeal of Ulysses: 

Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back. 

I protest, then, against reiterated emphasis on faults 
which no one denies, and a style of criticism which 
deals with the approaches to a subject rather than 
with the subject itself. A tyro, for example, sees the 
necessity of putting comic scenes into prose, and ap- 
preciates the superiority of the Falstaffian revelry, for 
this reason among others, to the scene at the inn where 
Juan teases Lopez. ' The Spanish Gypsy ' is a narra- 
tive poem, and carelessly defies dramatic unities and 
historical probabilities for the sake of an ethical prin- 
ciple. It was not written for the stage. We would 
stare at Shakspere writing his stage directions in 
verse, as a part of the text; but we only smile and pass 
on at George Eliot's — 

Enter the duke, Pable, and Annibal, 
Exit the cat, retreating towards the dark. 



248 George Eliot 

We might say that the dramatic end of the poem is 
the death of Zarca and the seizing of Silva by the in- 
furiated Gypsies; but that would have cut out the 
doxology from the hymn and the peroration from the 
sermon. And it is curious that the dramatic faults of 
an imperfect dramatist should approximate in some 
respects to the dramatic faults of a supreme drama- 
tist; for does not Shakspere continue 'Hamlet' after 
all interest ceases, namely, after Hamlet's death? The 
play ends, dramatically, with Horatio's " Good-night, 
sweet prince; " and the prompt-book so understands 
it, for it rings down the curtain before Fortinbras 
and other people we care nothing about have a chance 
to distract our attention from a stage where lie the 
dead bodies of the real actors in the drama. You see, 
it is only the critics who never transgress the unities. 
Is it not a pity that they do not write a drama once in 
a while to show us what really correct form is like? 

It has been abundantly proved, however, that 
George Eliot has dramatic power of a high order. 
The scenes descriptive of the meetings of Baldassare 
and Tito illustrate it, — on the Duomo steps, at Tessa's 
hiding-place, in the Rucellai gardens, in the final 
clutch on the river's bank. I have quoted the lan- 
guage of the scene describing the dying glory of the 
afternoon as Deronda approached Blackfriars bridge 
in his wherry, as an example of her poetical gifts; it 
is equally indicative of a dramatic feeling of rare in- 
tensity. For all that brooding splendor is but the 
setting to a supreme spiritual glory about to descend, 
like that other, upon this man. He lifts his eyes, as 
he fastens the top button of his cape, and sees on the 
bridge — " brought out by the western light into 
startling distinctness and brilliance " — Mordecai. 



Her Art 249 

It was the face of Mordecai, who also, in his watch 
towards the west, had caught sight of the advancing boat, 
and had kept it fast within his gaze, at first simply because 
it was advancing, then with a recovery of impressions that 
made him quiver as with a presentiment, till at last the 
nearing figure lifted up its face towards him, — the face of 
his visions, — and then immediately, with white uplifted 
hand, beckoned again and again. 

The paths meet; let the heavens burn. "The pre- 
figured friend had come from the golden background 
. . . this actually was : the rest was to be," It was 
no accidental meeting; Mordecai had been waiting 
for it for five years. 

" But now look up the river," said Mordecai, turning 
again towards it and speaking in undertones of what may be 
called an excited calm, — so absorbed by a sense of fulfil- 
ment that he was conscious of no barrier to a complete 
understanding between him and Deronda. " See the sky, 
how it is slowly fading ! I have always loved this bridge : 
I stood on it when I was a little boy. It is a meeting place 
for the spiritual messengers. It is true — what the Masters 
said — that each order of things has its angel : that means 
the full message of each from what is afar. Here I have lis- 
tened to the messages of earth and sky ; when I was stronger 
I used to stay and watch for the stars in the deep heavens. 
But this time, just about sunset, was always what I loved 
best. It has sunk into me and dwelt with me — fading, 
slowly fading ; it was my own decline. It paused — it 
waited, till at last it brought me my new life — my new self 
— who will live when this breath is all breathed out." 

" We boldly deny," says Mr. Jacobs of this scene, 
" we boldly deny greater tragic intensity to any inci- 
dent in Shakspere." ^ 

1 Macmillan's, vol. xxxvi., p. lOI. 



250 George Eliot 

There is, indeed, a close psychical kinship between 
Shakspere and George Eliot, which remains after 
you have subtracted the difference between his age 
and hers. For, notwithstanding the modern subtlety 
evident in the portrayal, her Bulstrode is far more 
Shaksperean than Dickens's Pecksniff or Moliere's 
Tartuffe ; because, though the subtlety be modern, it 
is subtlety, and there is no subtlety at all in those 
other hypocrites. But there is subtlety in Shak- 
spere's hypocrites, — in Claudius, for example. She 
is Shaksperean, too, in the management of separate 
sets of people, even where the inter-connections are 
slight. It relieves the mind and the eye to see a 
crowded stage ; it withdraws the attention from a too 
monotonous concentration on the main theme. Like 
a large historical painting, it shows the multifarious- 
ness of life ; and it is the means of introducing com- 
edy. It is as true of her as it is of Sheridan that her 
minor are as real as her major characters. There are 
no lay figures. To let one example stand for many, 
Philip Debarry is as fine as a portrait by Lawrence. 

She follows the great master, or perhaps we 
should say she follows the sure instinct of the dram- 
atist, in putting relatively slight particular events 
into strong contrast with the grand sweep of general 
events, — so illustrating the apparent littleness of the 
special world as compared with the real bigness of 
the outside world. 

While this poor little heart was being bruised with a 
weight too heavy for it, Nature was holding on her calm 
inexorable way in unmoved and terrible beauty. The stars 
were rushing in their eternal courses ; the tides swelled to 
the level of the last expectant weed ; the sun was making 



Her Art 251 

brilliant day to busy nations on the other side of the swift 
earth. The stream of human thought and deed was hurry- 
ing and broadening onward. The astronomer was at his 
telescope ; the great ships were laboring over the waves ; 
the toiling eagerness of commerce, the fierce spirit of revo- 
lution, were only ebbing in brief rest ; and sleepless states- 
men were dreading the possible crisis of the morrow. What 
were our little Tina and her trouble in this mighty torrent, 
rushing from one awful unknown to another? Lighter than 
the smallest centre of quivering life in the water-drop, hid- 
den and uncared for as the pulse of anguish in the breast 
of the tiniest bird that has fluttered down to its nest with 
the long-sought food, and has found the nest torn and 
empty. 

Mr. Tulliver's prompt procedure entailed on him further 
promptitude in finding the convenient person who was de- 
sirous of lending five hundred pounds on bond. " It must 
be no client of Wakem's," he said to himself; and yet at 
the end of a fortnight it turned out to the contrary, not 
because Mr. Tulliver's will was feeble, but because external 
fact was stronger, Wakem's client was the only convenient 
person to be found. Mr. Tulliver had a destiny as well as 
CEdipus, and in this case he might plead, like CEdipus, that 
his deed was inflicted on him, rather than committed by 
him. 

Could there be a slenderer, more insignificant thread in 
human history than this consciousness of a girl, busy with 
her small inferences of the way in which she could make 
her life pleasant? — in a time, too, when ideas were with 
fresh vigor making armies of themselves, and the universal 
kinship was declaring itself fiercely ; when women on the 
other side of the world would not mourn for the husbands 
and sons who died bravely in a common cause, and men 



252 George Eliot 

stinted of bread on our side of the world heard of that 
willing loss and were patient : a time when the soul of man 
was waking to pulses which had for centuries been beating 
in him unheard, until their full sum made a new life of ter- 
ror or of joy. 

What in the midst of that mighty drama are girls and 
their blind visions? They are the Yea or Nay of that good 
for which men are enduring and fighting. In these delicate 
vessels is borne onward through the ages the treasure of 
human affections. 



Reference has been made, as an indication of good 
honest art, to her habit of hinting at the outcome of 
her story at or near its beginning. The depths of 
Tito's future deceit are sounded by that wise fore- 
caster, Piero di Cosimo, on the first day of his career 
in Florence. We see the tragic possibilities sur- 
rounding the Tullivers in the careless, boyish talk of 
Tom and Bob Jakin. Shakspere, once more, plunges 
171 medias res, and into the end of things, too. The 
tragedy of * Hamlet ' hangs on what Hamlet does, 
and what he does depends upon what the Ghost 
tells him to do ; so the Ghost enters Act I., Scene i. 
Finally, she is Shaksperean in the proximity of her 
tragedy and comedy; sufficient examples of which 
are the Rainbow tavern scene, the talk at the Genoese 
wharf after Grandcourt's death, and the contrast be- 
tween Mordecai and little Jacob Cohen. It is all 
profoundly true to life. 

If her dramas were more technically dramatic, 
they would lose in psychic value. They are for the 
closet. Her contemplative outweighed her dramatic 
powers because she was not merely a dramatist. 



Her Art 253 



X 

Whatever one may think of ' Daniel Deronda ' after 
'Adam Bede,' the disappointment is not, or ought 
not to be, due to the transfer of the scene to city 
life and the manners of county people. A sufficient 
hint was given in that earlier work of an ability to 
portray refinement, in the sketch of the Irwines, which 
should have prepared all intelligent readers for its 
fuller display in later books. George Eliot knew 
" Society." Her observation was not limited to the 
middle and artisan classes, nor was her discriminative 
enthusiasm kindled only by her passion for the coun- 
try. She had also an intellectual companionship with 
the city, and with that which corresponded to it in 
county houses. The inside history of some of the 
adverse criticism of * Daniel Deronda ' would make 
interesting reading, painful as it might be to those 
who look for such generous comradeship among lit- 
erary folk as of necessity excludes jealousy at the in- 
vasion of one field by a master of another. Any 
reasonably calm view would lead one to suppose that 
the skill which could carve out an Adam Bede and 
a Silas Marner would be equally successful with a 
Sir Hugo or a Mr. Van der Noodt; and would jus- 
tify the expectations that the art which is shown in 
devising the conversation of the tenants at Arthur's 
birthday party would be just as much at home in 
reporting the give-and-take talk of the upper class 
across Grandcourt's mahogany. Her success in this 
department developed rapidly, and never deterio- 
rated. Captain Wybrovv and Miss Assher are drawn 
with a somewhat uncertain hand, but at the very next 



2 54 George Eliot 

stroke she rises to the full possession of power in 
the Irwines; unHke poor Miss Bronte, whose Ginevra 
Fanshawe is as bad as her Blanche Ingram. It is 
another proof of her remarkable observation that she 
not only gives to each of these sharply defined ex- 
tremes its appropriate language, but shades most 
delicately the difficult differences between county 
manners and the style of the middle class. There 
is no mistaking the provincial atmosphere of the men 
Mr. Brooke had invited to his table ; and no careful 
reader would ever suppose that Mr. Brooke himself, 
with all his commonplaceness, belonged to that set. 

XI 

Who ever entered more deeply into the moods of 
her characters than George Eliot? At the 'Adam 
Bede ' period she was as far removed from the reli- 
gious influences of her childhood as she ever was ; 
and yet it was George Eliot who drew that sweet 
Wesleyan saint, Dinah Morris. The very passion 
of religious outpouring pulses in her exhortations, 
and the pleading in the prison with Hetty is a grand 
night-wrestle with God. If there is a classical litera- 
ture of prayer, the prayers in ' Adam Bede ' belong 
to it. 

The character of Kalonymos, in ' Daniel Deronda,' 
has always seemed to me an excellent example 
of this sympathetic power of entrance into mental 
attitudes not her own ; and its consideration next 
to the paragraph dealing with Dinah will, in ad- 
dition, indicate the multifariousness of her genius. 
Kalonymos is the type of the faithful high-class, but 
not vividly religious, Jew; with the steady gaze of 



Her Art 255 

the fatalist, and taking opinions as he took the shapes 
of trees; loving freedom, but not thinking of his 
people's future. He told Deronda that when travel- 
ling in the East he liked to lie on deck and watch 
the stars : the sight of them satisfied him, and he had 
no further hunger. " And almost as soon as Deronda 
was in London," the author says at the end of the 
interview, " the aged man was again on shipboard, 
greeting the friendly stars without any eager curios- 
ity." It is an effective touch — that fine old Kalony- 
mos watching his stars, and it is quite apart from 
other touches. We may not recognize his counter- 
part among our present acquaintances, yet we instinc- 
tively feel the truth of it all ; and when we do meet 
him we shall recognize him. 

In a widely sympathetic nature, responsive to in- 
fluences from unusual as well as customary surround- 
ings ; or in a mental habit of calm, sane, open-eyed, 
unemotional receptiveness, like that of Kalonymos, 
who takes nature at her word, without asking any 
questions, — who has an affection rather than a love 
for nature ; or, again, in a fundamentally religious 
constitution, whose depths may be stirred profoundly, 
but only by profound causes, — in all such there is no 
dread of the supernatural. The Kalonymos class, 
satisfied that it is a part of the celestial order, would 
receive its manifestations with a cool enjoyment and 
a fearless curiosity; and with the other two a sense 
of wonder and a feeling of awe would completely 
swamp all vulgar manifestations of alarm. We cannot 
fancy Dinah Morris frightened at a thunder storm. 
One of the most telling strokes in the portraiture of 
Gwendolen Harleth is the terror she feels when the 
supernatural touches her. There is no depth in her 



256 George Eliot 

to correspond with the depth in the phenomenon; 
no deep answering to deep. It is as if a great tornado 
struck a duck-pond, — its piteous shallowness bared 
to the lightning's flash. 

Not only in the general symmetry of her characters, 
but in the tender side-lights she throws upon their 
varying moods from the many-angled mirror of her 
sympathy, does she satisfy the anxious expectations 
of art. Do we ever stop to consider what the word 
" sympathy " stands for in all its fulness? To cultivate 
it, says Ruskin, " you must be among living creatures 
and thinking about them ; " and that means not only 
an intellectual efifort to comprehend them, but that 
quick understanding of another's feeling which seems 
like a sudden warm pressure of the hand — a sympathy 
without criticism, almost without speech. George 
Eliot so understood Romola' s mood when she pic- 
tured her setting forth on the day of the procession 
with Brigida : " Romola set out in that languid state 
of mind with which every one enters on a long day 
of sight-seeing purely for the sake of gratifying a 
child or some dear childish friend." 



C — HER SYMPATHY: FURTHER 
CONSIDERED 



It is time to examine a little more narrowly into 
the texture of this sympathy, which she wore, not as 
fine clothes or jewelry, but as a necessary garment 
for warmth. 

It is a fine thing to be able to show how a despi- 
cable character has, perhaps by some mysterious in- 
heritance, or by the sure working out of some hidden 
law, a bent or twist which circumstances will mould 
along the line of a resistance made the least by these 
conditions. The growth of Tito's duplicity was like 
the rising tide. He had borrowed from falsehood, 
and he had to pay the debt by further borrowings. 
George Eliot makes no weak apologies, and is not 
one of those fools who make a mock at sin by calling 
bitter sweet and sweet bitter. She subtly removes 
him more and more from her sympathy and ours, or 
rather, let us say, he removes himself from a sympa- 
thy which would still wistfully follow him if it might ; 
and yet without dogmatism, without undue emphasis 
or passion, she makes it evident that Tito's troubles 
come largely from an innate love of reticence. It was 
an impulse, acting unconsciously at the beginning : 
concealment was easy to him. " He would now and 

17 



258 George Eliot 

then conceal something which had as little the nature 
of a secret as the fact that he had seen a flight of 
crows." It does not lessen the despicability of the 
character, viewed objectively, and it does not call for 
much waste of pity viewed subjectively ; but it does 
widen our sympathies with glimpses into dark un- 
opened chambers where one must grope blindly to 
find the key of escape. George Eliot makes us hate 
the sin for a long time before we begin to hate 
the sinner, so insidious is this growth of reticence 
into falsehood, and so subtly does it blend with his 
pleasure-loving nature, which finds it easier to lie than 
to bear burdens under the truth. He is a lovable 
fellow, even after he has begun to deceive, and we are 
kept hoping that he will find the courage to retrace 
his steps. Such good looks, such pleasant manners, 
such winning address, such sweet amiability — surely 
Apollo will not turn into an evil god ! But the 
canker grows and grows, until in one of those grand 
climacteric moments which carry within them all the 
mockery of the past and all the tragedy of the future, 
he stands before Romola, not in the fair Grecian shape 
which won her, but "in his loathsome^ beauty," his 
attractiveness, her curse. 

Of all hopeless cases of sympathy one would say 
the case of the miser was the most hopeless. Yet no 
one can ever read * Silas Marner' without thinking 
that perhaps there are extenuating circumstanes for 
all the other misers also. And what is there accom- 
plished in an idyll is more laboriously traced forth in 
the complicated history of Mr. Bulstrode. The piti- 

1 " Twenty letters of twenty pages do not display a character," 
says Taine, in his chapter on Richardson, "but one sharp word 
does." 



Her Sympathy 259 

ableness of his position is allowed to disturb the 
security of our scorn only so far as a sympathetic 
analysis of his temperamental peculiarities tempers 
our desire to see the heaviest punishment inflicted. 
The dangerous doctrine is not taught that a man is 
not to be held responsible for the unforeseen conse- 
quences of his actions ; what is enforced is the diffi- 
culty of deciding how far he is to be held responsible. 
The honest force of righteous indignation is nowhere 
minimized in George Eliot's work, but is, on the con- 
trary, applauded ; and yet there is a gentle insistence 
of " Judge not," because there may be some hidden 
fact which if known would alter the judgment. The 
glory of such magnanimity shines the more steadfastly 
in that while it is easy to find excuses for vices akin 
to our own, and for such as are somewhat loosely 
classed as " amiable," it requires sympathy of an 
heroic fibre to shadow forth natural causes for un- 
natural vices, and to attempt an understanding of one 
spiritually one's opposite. As George Eliot is, of all 
novelists, the most strenuous in emphasizing the 
beauty of altruism, it would be natural to expect a 
coldness of feeling towards the unloveliness of egoism. 
But it is a part of her reverent attitude towards this 
same Social Good that she should be eminently 
just to all, — including therefore those opposed to the 
Social Good : hence her sympathy with those most 
naturally repugnant to her sympathy. I do not 
know of such a mental attitude, proceeding from 
such a moral purpose, in any other novelist.^ 

1 The fairness resulting from an honest, intelligent sympathy is 
clearly illustrated in her defence of Byron against the pietistic cant 
of Gumming. In her essay against that preacher's doctrines she 
repudiates with noble scorn the charge that Byron's " dying moments " 



26o George Eliot 

Thus she makes it apparent that Mr. Bulstrode's 
way of explaining dispensations would have been 
deceitful only to an idealized self, — that is, to a self 
freed from egoistic fetters: in view of those fetters, 
it was a genuine method because egoism does not 
affect the sincerity of beliefs ; " rather, the more our 
egoism is satisfied, the more robust is our belief." 
He is wrapped in the atmosphere of a doctrine which 
admits of the view that the depth of a particular sin 
is " but a measure for the depth of forgiveness." If 
sin is egoism, in the bad sense and with all that may 
logically flow from its uncontrolled possession of a 
man, a religious system which may be twisted into a 
feeder for this egoism is to be taken into considera- 
tion. Mr. Bulstrode was in the grasp of such a sys- 
tem. He was a hypocrite, yes, but it was a doctrinal 
hypocrisy ; and that is of a kind that can only be 
understood, and then only partially, by an under- 
standing of the doctrine. The " outer " conscience, 
with its concrete warnings, is likely to be swallowed 
up in the " inner " conscience of abstract formulas: 
bad deeds are excused by a " sense of pardon." 
George Eliot does not mean to say that doctrines are 
responsible for sins. A man may use his religion for 
a cloak of maliciousness. But she delicately shows 
how " mixed " the sinner's motives are likely to be 
when the sinner is a certain kind of a " professing 
Christian." 

were spent in writing a certain recklessly hopeless poem ; rejoicing 
that, on the contrary, the poet's " unhappy career was ennobled and 
purified towards its close by a high and sympathetic purpose, by 
honest and energetic efforts for his fellow-men." Yet by turning to 
the passage referred to in the footnote to p. 196, it will be seen that 
this generous tribute is in the face of a general and fundamental 
dislike of Lord Byron's character. 



Her Sympathy 261 

Nor does she make Bulstrode wish to continue in 
sin that grace may abound. He would have echoed 
St. Paul's "God forbid!" to that; and yet that is 
what he actually did. He used his wealth — such, 
for instance, as he got through investments in the 
dyes which rotted Mr. Vincy's silk — for the exaltation 
of God's cause; " which was something distinct from 
his own rectitude of conduct." Vincy was, in Bul- 
strode's view, one of God's enemies, in that he was a 
worldly man : he was to be used, therefore, as an 
instrument in Mr. Bulstrode's hands for the glory of 
God, through wealth wrung from Vincy, who would 
not have used it for God's glory. 

Mr. Bulstrode had from the first moments of shrink- 
ing, but they were private, and took the form of 
prayer. " Thou knowest how loose my soul sits from 
these things — how I view them all as implements 
for tilling Thy garden rescued here and there from 
the wilderness." It was easy for him to settle what 
was due from him to others by inquiring what was 
God's intention in regard to himself. He was not a 
coarse hypocrite. " He was simply a man whose 
desires had been stronger than his theoretic beliefs, 
and who had gradually explained the gratification of 
his desires into satisfactory agreement with those 
beliefs." 

But, that we may not charge his hypocrisy against 
his " Evangelical " creed, in the flattering belief that our 
own creed, for example, if it does not happen to be 
" Evangelical," would have saved him, George Eliot 
points out, with her wide-eyed sanity of vision, that 
we are all occasional hypocrites of this sort, and that 
Bulstrode's implicit reasoning is not peculiar to his 
sect. *' There is no general doctrine which is not 



262 George Eliot 

capable of eating out our morality if unchecked by 
the deep-seated habit of direct fellow-feeling with 
individual fellow-men." 

The two night scenes with Raffles are a most mar- 
vellous revelation of insight into the motive force of 
this subconsciousness of desire warping the soul from 
its true course. Bulstrode was bound by conscience 
to obey Lydgate's behest not to give his patient 
liquors of any sort. All through the first night his 
prayers for Raffles are colored by wishes which can 
only be accomplished by Raffles's death. Then the 
apologies for those wishes: Who was Raffles? Why 
should such a useless, miserable creature live to 
torture him, Bulstrode, God's servant, and wreck all 
his plans for God's glory? Ah, yes, but it was dread- 
ful to think of his dying so impenitent. Well, were 
not public criminals impenitent, and did they not 
have to die? If Providence should award death to 
this private criminal, as the law did with the public 
criminals, surely there was no sin in contemplating it 
as desirable, Lydgate might have made a mistake. 
He was human. None of the other doctors in Middle- 
march would have prescribed in that way. Perhaps 
the opposite course of treatment was the correct one. 
No, no. He will obey Lydgate's orders. He will 
separate his intentions from his desires. But if the 
orders are not valid ? Piteous, piteous conflict ! 

Then the day comes, and with it Lydgate, Raffles 
is pronounced worse. Lydgate prescribes opium in 
case of prolonged sleeplessness, and is most minute 
in his directions as to the point at which the doses 
should cease. He also reiterates his orders against 
alcohol. The next night — the fatal night — arrives. 
Bulstrode is too weary for further watching, and turns 



Her Sympathy 263 

the case over to the housekeeper; but forgets to tell 
her when the doses of opium must cease. An hour 
and a half elapses. He starts to make good the 
omission — and stops. Perhaps she has already 
given him too much. He hesitates a long time. 
Raffles can be heard moaning and murmuring. As 
there was still no sleep, perhaps Lydgate's prescrip- 
tion had best be disobeyed. He turns away from the 
sick man's room. Presently Mrs. Abel raps at his 
door. Cannot she give the poor sinking creature 
some brandy? Bulstrode does not answer; the 
struggle is going on within him. Mrs. Abel, who 
knows nothing of Lydgate's prohibition, pleads 
strongly for the stimulant. Still silence. " It 's not 
a time to spare when people are at death's door," 
cries Mrs. Abel, in her ignorant pity. He gives her 
the key of the wine-cooler. ... At six o'clock he 
rises and spends some time in prayer. He visits 
Raffles, and finds him in his last agony. He hides 
the almost empty opium phial and the brandy bottle; 
and Lydgate, on his arrival, is forced to the con- 
clusion that his treatment was a mistake. That is all. 
It was virtually murder; the diseased motive acting 
" like an irritating agent in his blood." 

II 

A book full of human nature must be more or less 
full of human sin. We know George Eliot's defini- 
tion of sin, and we know why she deals with it, and 
how. She widens the scope of morality in fiction, 
by extending the word " sin " to something beyond 
the infraction of one of the commandments, as if no 
grief could ever flow from less evident aspects of 



264 George Eliot 

wrong-doing. It is not difficult to fancy how George 
Sand would have dealt with Maggie and Stephen. 
Our sympathies are much more subtly moved, how- 
ever, by the picture of Maggie, not sinning in a way 
which would indicate, among other things, a vulgar 
lack of inventive imagination on the part of the 
author, but undergoing self-imposed expiation for an 
injustice done another in thought, not deed, — an 
expiation made sublime by the fact that it involves a 
public condemnation such as would have been called 
forth by the sin of deed ; Maggie's public having 
every reason to suppose that the sin of deed had 
been committed. 

Perhaps her intense sympathy does lead her into 
an occasional weakness. Her tenderness in the treat- 
ment of folly grows, like other used faculties, and a 
little out of proportion, now and then, to the other 
faculties. 

" Continual harvest wears the fruitful field." 
In one of her poetical headings she says: 

" Pity the laden one: this wandering woe 
May visit you or me ; " 

and she extends her pity to the woe-causer. She is 
as sorry for Tryan as for Tryan's victim. Mr. Irwine, 
it seems to us, is almost too pitiful for Arthur. Arthur 
is more favorably considered than Anthony in ' Mr. 
Gilfil,' and yet he is of the same stripe. The Poysers, 
one feels, ought really to have left the neighborhood, 
as they wished to do, to make the Nemesis complete. 
But then, as we have seen, her Nemesis has some heal- 
ing in her wings. It is a deep question, and it may 
be that she errs on the safe side. 



Her Sympathy 265 

The treatment of Dorothea is clearly an indication, 
however, of a faculty used to excess, for the reader 
fails to give his sympathy into the keeping of the 
author's ; which, when the reader is in general sym- 
pathy with the author, — when he is a sympathetic 
reader, in short, — suggests, at least, a false note some- 
where. The character is built on a sure foundation ; 
namely, the lack of complete ideality in woman; but 
the superstructure is not convincingly true. "All 
Dorothea's passion was transferred through a mind 
struggling toward an ideal life ; the radiance of her 
transfigured girlhood fell on the first object that came 
within its level." Exactly; but was Casaubon within 
the level of any such girl as Dorothea? His letter 
of proposal is nothing more than a bid for an amanu- 
ensis. Can it be supposed that a girl like that would 
not see through such language, — would not feel in- 
sulted by the suggestion that their introduction came 
at a moment when he most needed help for the com- 
pletion of a life's plan? He is proposing marriage 
to her, but he is thinking of himself and his book on 
fish deities and things. The "meanness of opportu- 
nity " is what galled Dorothea, but that is a kind of 
meanness felt by all whose ideals are higher than their 
surroundings; and it is difficult to conceive of any 
genuine girl regarding that semi-petrified mummy as 
in any way a realization of an ideal. 

In the concluding chapter of the story, Dorothea is 
pictured as living happily with Ladislaw, and yet the 
general opinion seems to be that, spiritually, her mar- 
riage with that attractive Bohemian was her second 
mistake. The author acknowledges that it was not 
ideally beautiful. And she maintains that her first 
mistake could not have happened if " Society" had 



266 George Eliot 

not smiled on such propositions. But Dorothea's 
society did not smile on it. Brooke said all he could 
for Chettam, although what Brooke said on any subject 
was not much to the purpose, and she would not have 
had Chettam, no matter who had spoken for him. Her 
sister is filled with horror at the thought of the mar- 
riage. She has been ridiculing Casaubon before 
Dorothea, unconscious of her engagement; and when 
that is announced she is awed with a sense of doom. 
" There was something funereal in the whole affair, 
and Mr. Casaubon seemed to be the officiating clergy- 
man, about whom it would be indecent to make re- 
marks." When Chettam hears of the engagement 
he exclaims — as do all of us — "Good God! It is 
horrible ! " Mrs. Cadwallader's view is that the great 
soul which Dorothea has discovered in Casaubon is 
really a great bladder for dried peas to rattle in; and 
as for Mr. Cadwallader, why should he interfere? It 
was surely none of his business. George Eliot's 
horses have run away with her, for once. In the first 
place, Casaubon is too evident a bag-of-bones to win 
the warm esteem of any Dorothea; and in the second 
place, Dorothea's story closes in great happiness, not- 
withstanding the author's intention to make it plain 
that it ought not to, in the light of ideal longings. It 
is a double failure, — the result of an overworked 
sympathy. 

Ill 

Her extensive feeling is shown by her frequent use 
of the word * poor ' : it is ' poor Tom,' * poor Rosa- 
mond,' ' poor Mr. Casaubon,' where we think of the 
adjective as primarily applicable in a very different 



Her Sympathy 267 

sense. But this, again, may be the non-possession in 
us of that wide horizon of hers. At least, she does not 
allow us to have any gross misconceptions as to the 
cause of sin ; being careful to point out, for example, 
that Stephen's fault was not hypocrisy, but something 
much more subtle. " For my part, I am very sorry 
for him," she says of Casaubon ; and for her reason 
she gives us a picture of a scholarly scrupulousness 
made egoistic by an absence of emotion, a denial of 
inspiration, and a total lack of humor. Why should 
we not pity him, too, — this pallid Casaubon — a little 
— just a little — bit? What she really thought of 
Casaubon's magnum opus is expressed in Dorothea's 
revolt and Ladislaw's contempt; and in another book 
as follows : " the heaping of cat-mummies and the ex- 
pensive cult of enshrined putrefactions." Yet her own 
sense of humor inspires her to discern, even in her- 
self, the minor shades of faults which in their unshaded 
intensity glare in him. She is not tainted with the 
common error of confusing sympathy with respect. 
She has no respect for Casaubon's work, as such, 
but much sympathy with him in the light of his en- 
vironment. " I have some feeling for Dr. Sprague," 
she says. " One's self-satisfaction is an untaxed 
kind of property which it is very unpleasant to find 
depreciated." 

Sympathy tempers the judgment, and the chief 
intellectual result is fairness. Savonarola's refusal to 
interfere with the execution of Bernardo was a par- 
ticularly heinous offence in George Eliot's eyes, and 
her great fairness is nowhere better shown than in her 
continued sympathy with the friar after that downfall 
in her esteem. It is only the Grandcourts she cannot 
help with her compassion, and that through no fault 



268 George Eliot 

of hers, — them and the " moral swindlers " she fulmi- 
nates against in ' Theophrastus ; ' and even those we 
can fancy brought within the range of her painstaking 
thought when placed in the artistic setting of fiction. 
Mr. Hutton says of Rosamond Vincy: "This ex- 
quisitely painted figure is the deadliest blow at the 
commonplace assumption that limitation in both heart 
and brain is a desirable thing for women that has ever 
been struck." ^ And the education of a young lady in 
her day (has it changed so very much since, in our 
fashionable "seminaries"?) encouraged such limita- 
tions. Like the rest of us, Rosamond is partially the 
product of her environment. The woman who could 
break Lydgate's heart could nevertheless be the flower 
of Mrs. Lemon's school, " where the teaching included 
all that was demanded in the accomplished female, 
even to extras, such as the getting in and out of a 
carriage." " Propriety " was her bugaboo, and Mrs. 
Lemon taught it as earnestly as Arnold taught Latin 
and Greek. Taste she was mistress of, and there her 
powers ceased. She is the kind of young lady who 
smiles little in society, because the smile reveals 
dimples which she thinks unbecoming ; who is ashamed 
of her good mother's use of such words as " tetchy " 
and " pick ; " who feels that she might have been 
happier if she had not been the daughter of a Middle- 
march manufacturer; and who is hit off to a nicety 
by her brother Fred, who tells her that the word 
" disagreeable " does not describe the smell of grilled 
bone to which she objects, but a sensation in her 
" little nose associated with certain finicking notions 
which are the classics of Mrs. Lemon's school." So 

^ ' Essays on Some of the Modern Guides of English Thought in 
Matters of Faith,' by Richard Holt Hutton. Macmillan, London, 1S87. 



Her Sympathy 269 

Rosamond, too, is taken into the broad bosom of 
George Eliot's sympathy, and we are made to see 
that a lamentable deficiency in the educational sys- 
tem must be fairly weighed as important evidence 
in the final judgment of a character whose native 
narrowness could only be removed by an altogether 
different system. Mrs. Lemon and the general ar- 
rangement of things which permits Mrs. Lemon to 
exist are partially responsible. Not all our pity must 
go to Lydgate. 

IV 

If George Eliot asks us to enter with her into a 
sympathetic understanding of the mental conditions 
of people who are neither her favorites nor ours, and 
who stand in the way of the happiness of the favor- 
ites, she does not, on the other hand, fail to point out 
the faults in those favorites which help to make the 
unhappiness possible. She has not, it is true, the 
modern trick of disparaging the personal appearance 
of her heroes and heroines, and she does not depre- 
cate their " irregular features," nor apologize for their 
lack of beauty. She is sufficiently in love with her 
Esthers and Romolas and Dorotheas to think them 
beautiful, and to make us think so, too. She is 
chiefly occupied, however, with the more important 
business of illustrating their moral shortcomings; and 
they are ethical, rather than aesthetic heroines. 

Thus Lydgate, of whom, I think, George Eliot is 
the most fond of all her heroes, has a fundamental 
fault, — a flaw in a base otherwise nobly strong, and 
which causes the downfall of the statue. If he had only 
married Dorothea ! IF : precisely ; the whole tragedy 



2/0 George Eliot 

of the universe is held in that one Httle word. There is 
just a thread of coarseness in Lydgate's attitude 
towards women, — a thread as common to men of 
intellect and chivalry as a still coarser fibre is to men 
of lower grade ; it is the tendency to exalt mere out- 
ward grace to a pinnacle the rarified atmosphere of 
which only grace of the inward and spiritual sort can 
bear. Lydgate, with all his cleverness and worth, is 
not capable of gauging such a character as Dorothea's ; 
although Ladislaw, who has been quite an unnecessary 
grief to Dorothea's admirers (for he is really a fine 
fellow), has the essential necromancy which Lydgate, 
his superior in most things, lacks. He is afraid of 
Dorothea : " a little too earnest," he thinks. " It is 
troublesome to talk to such women. They are always 
wanting reasons, yet they are too ignorant to under- 
stand the merits of any question, and usually fall back 
on their moral sense to settle things after their own 
taste." But of Rosamond he thinks : " She is grace 
itself; she is perfectly lovely and accomplished. That 
is what a woman ought to be : she ought to produce 
the effect of beautiful music." " Notwithstanding her 
undeniable beauty," Miss Brooke is found wanting in 
that she does not fill his idea of adornment, which, to 
his notion, is the first necessary qualification in a wife. 
She did not possess the " melodic charm " for him that 
the other woman did. " She did not look at things from 
the proper feminine angle. The society of such 
women was about as relaxing as going from your 
work to teach the second form, instead of reclining 
in a paradise with sweet laughs for bird-notes, and 
blue eyes for a heaven." So, although his point of 
view is far from being the same as Mr. Chichely's, 
what he sees is not dissimilar ; that coursing gentle- 



Her Sympathy 271 

man confessing, " Between ourselves, the mayor's 
daughter is more to my taste than Miss Brooke." 
And thus Lydgate got his bird-notes and his blue 
eyes, — got them with a vengeance ; and the paradise 
that he reclined in was the chair he flung himself into 
that day when the Quallingham letter came ; check- 
mated by the utter insensibility to all true values of 
that "perfectly lovely and accomplished" product 
of Mrs. Lemon's fashionable school. This masculine 
vice (which takes hold of the Lydgates as well as the 
Chichelys) of blindness to psychical, in the neighbor- 
hood of physical, grace, and which deceived this 
particular Lydgate into thinking the physical was but 
the outward and visible part of something lovely in- 
ward and spiritual, was the cause of his wasted energy 
and the wreck of his noble ambitions. " This is what 
I am thinking of; and that is what I might have been 
thinking of." And the man who had dreamed of 
discoveries which would have revolutionized medical 
treatment finally writes a treatise on gout — of all 
things in the world — and calls his wife his basil 
plant, — "a plant which had once flourished wonder- 
fully on a murdered man's brains." 

What has been said about George Eliot's percep- 
tive qualities, joined to what has been said about her 
conscientious avoidance of generalities, is perhaps the 
sufficient evidence of a peculiarly logical order of 
mind in which synthesis follows in beautiful sequence 
upon analysis. First of all, she observed, — she gave 
a close attention to the things she was to write about; 
and observation " is the great instrument of discovery 
in mind and matter" because it is the instrument of 
the analytical method. The percept, let us say, is 
Tom Tulliver. Like all other objects, he stands 



272 George Eliot 

before us in a complex state. How can we best 
understand what is simple in Tom, resolve him from 
his complexities into his elements? We must sepa- 
rate him from the other characters, — from Mr. Riley 
among the others. Mr. Riley enters Tom's life at a 
very important period, being called in by Mr. Tulliver 
for advice concerning Tom's schooling. He recom- 
mends Mr. Stelling, without a sufficient knowledge 
of his acquirements. Stelling was the son-in-law of 
Timpson, and Riley was kindly disposed towards 
Timpson. He did not know of any other school- 
master whom he had any ground for recommending 
in preference to Stelling; why, then, should he not 
recommend Stelling? It is chilling to have no 
opinion when your opinion is asked ; and if you are 
to give it at all, it is stupid not to give it with an air 
of conviction. Riley knows no harm of Stelling. He 
wishes him well, especially as he is the son-in-law of 
Timpson. He recommends him, therefore, and then 
he " begins to think with admiration of a man recom- 
mended on such high authority." There was no plot 
for self-interest in the advice. The idea of pleasing 
Timpson by serving Stelling was one of those "little 
dim ideas and complacencies " which enter without 
forethought into a brain stimulated by a snug open 
fire and such open-handed hospitality as Mr. Tulliver 
was famous for. His "immovability of face, and the 
habit of taking a pinch of snufif before he gave an 
answer made him trebly oracular to Mr. Tulliver." 
On this highly imperfect evidence, poor Tom (we 
cannot avoid the "poor," after all) is subjected to a 
treatment of instruction resulting only in unhappiness 
and heaviness of spirit, and Mr. Tulliver is made to 
sacrifice money he ought to save. 



Her Sympathy 273 

It Is, in itself, a most subtle analysis of Mr. Riley's 
mental attitude, but it is here introduced to illustrate 
the author's method of separating the influence of the 
environment in order to show what this particular 
Tom might have been with Mr. Riley eliminated. 
Hence our sympathy with Tom — a spiritually hard 
and unyielding character, but demanding pity, never- 
theless, as well as Maggie. The author says, as it 
were : Put yourself and all your friends in Tom's 
place, and the result would be the same. 

Like all creators, she must be more than an analyst, 
or she would be no more than a scientist, and an in- 
complete one at that. On the contrary, we have a 
system in George Eliot, because her synthesis is 
founded upon her analysis. Art is constructive, and 
construction is essentially synthetic. While laws are 
the result of discovered facts, the artist derives sub- 
sequent facts from the laws, which is deduction, — 
the process of synthesis. It is an axiom of philosophy 
that the analysis must be exact, else the synthesis will 
not be legitimate. We have seen how exact her an- 
alysis is. There is, to be sure, such a thing as pure 
imagination, which is synthesis without analysis ; but 
George Eliot's imagination, like Wordsworth's and 
Dante's, is not of that order. Her deduction was 
based on induction, her synthesis on a precedent an- 
alysis, because of her sympathy with her subject. There 
are certain known characteristics of Lydgate and 
Rosamond, and the artist's business is to show us the 
tragic facts resulting from these clashing laws of 
character. By tracing the motive to its source, she 
forces upon us an attitude of judicial fairness. It is 
a noble thing to be fair-minded. We ought not to 
blame a stream for its muddiness. Perhaps there is 

18 



274 George Eliot 

a mud spring that Is responsible. And then what 
caused the spring to be muddy? Tom Tulliver as 
we know him is the joint result of the different ten- 
dencies acting upon him and in him. The tendencies 
have been decomposed, and a general principle has 
evolved. He is studied in the light of the principle, 
and we have the special case. One must be a logician 
to do it rightly, and one must be a poet to do it wisely. 

The delineation of Machiavelli, in ' Romola,' is a 
good illustration of this mental process, George 
Eliot was thoroughly familiar with the works of the 
Italian in the original, which is a different sort of 
knowledge from that derived from translations. She 
knew the times also. The result is a most interesting 
sketch of a character which she makes attractive with- 
out minimizing the qualities we associate with that 
name; or, it would be more correct to say, without 
omitting hints of those qualities, because the portrait 
is of Machiavelli in his youth. 

His conversation is tinctured with the peculiar 
flavor which we should naturally expect in the future 
author of ' The Prince.' He admires Soderini's attack 
upon Pieroda Bibbiena because both the offence and 
its punishment are beneficial to Soderini. He says 
at another time, in illustration of this Machiavellian 
idea: "Many of these half-way severities are mere 
hot-headed blundering. The only safe blows to be 
inflicted on men and parties are the blows that are 
too heavy to be avenged ; " and when Cennini says 
that is Satanical, he laughs and replies that Satan was 
a blunderer who made a stupendous failure. " If he 
had succeeded we should all have been worshipping 
him, and his portrait would have been more flattered." 
He measures " men's dulness by the devices they trust 



Her Sympathy 275 

in for deceiving others." His clear natural vision 
penetrates the political mistakes of Savonarola, and 
he points out with cool incisiveness the fatal points 
in the friar's position. But he lacks the vision which 
belongeth not to the natural man, and fails to fathom 
the spiritual grandeur of Savonarola. He is always 
contrasted pleasantly with the merely spiteful cynics 
like Francesco Cei and Ceccone. When Cei sneers at 
Politian for praising both Savonarola and Alexander, 
Machiavelli laughs and says, " A various scholar must 
have various opinions," — the cynicism of intellect 
versus the cynicism of sheer ill-will. His refined 
irony is always used as a buffer, in ' Romola,' to some 
grosser kind. There is a winsome magnanimity in 
him, in fact, for, though suspicious of Tito, and a 
little jealous of his success, he defends him against 
the venom of Cei's gossip about the stolen jewels: 
" You forget the danger of the precedent, Francesco. 
The next mad beggarman may accuse you of stealing 
his verses, or me, God keep me, of stealing his 
coppers." And yet he is not above thinking Savona- 
rola capable of false prophesyings, nor does he blame 
him for them except that they are not wise prophesy- 
ings also, as the times were on his side, and he might 
have done something great. The grand charcoal 
sketch of Savonarola in this novel reveals faults as 
well as virtues ; but because Machiavelli's natural 
cleverness was unable to comprehend the complexi- 
ties of the faults, it could not pierce the depth of the 
virtues. The analysis is so fine that one exclaims, 
" That is the real Machiavelli ! " And the case is 
interesting because the synthesis is not only based 
on a true analysis, but is illuminated also by the his- 
torical imagination. 



276 George Eliot 



The makers of the best of modern English diction- 
aries have thought so well of Fred Vincy's definition 
of a prig that they have included it among the ex- 
amples under that title. " A prig," says Fred, " is a 
fellow who is always making you a present of his 
opinions." He is, of necessity, a kill-joy and a 
nuisance; a jest for enemies and a burden for 
friends. And he is of no use whatever in the world, 
unless as a test for saintship in others ; for to put up 
with him charity must suffer very long and be most 
exceeding kind. It was like old Thackeray to say 
that his Esmond was a prig; but he was, in reality, 
nothing of the kind. Thackeray held the common 
view that if you stood stoutly for virtue and truth, 
and did not yield now and then to the weaknesses of 
the majority, you were a bit too good for mortal 
companionship. It is a thoroughly worldly view, 
because Thackeray was a thorough man of the 
world. But surely that is not priggishness? If it Is, 
then all the strong souls that have ever lived, all the 
reformers and all the martyrs, and all who have not 
been afraid to look Wrong in the face and say, " You 
are Wrong," and to look Right in the face and say, 
*' You are Right," have been prigs ; and the only 
persons who are not prigs are the easy-going 
creatures we meet every day, who do what most men 
and women do for no other reason than that most 
men and women do it. If there is anybody in this 
vale of tears who is wholly irreproachable, you may 
be sure that he is the one man in the universe who 
is wholly modest: if he is conscious of the fact, it 



Her Sympathy ' 277 

follows that he is not irreproachable. The trouble 
with most " irreproachable " people is that they are 
unapproachable also. 

Daniel Deronda is, therefore, most decidedly, not 
a prig. His chief weakness is sympathy ["you have 
a passion for people who are pelted, Dan "], which is 
the chief thing a prig is deficient in. A prig is an 
egoist. Deronda was always doing, or thinking 
about doing, something for others. He did not 
smoke himself, but he carried a cigar case in his 
pocket, the contents of which he offered his friends, 
upon occasion. A prig would have pointed out to 
his tobacco-consuming acquaintances the evils of the 
habit, illustrating the beauty of abstention with edi- 
fying references to himself Lydgate is not a prig, 
because his occasionally pragmatical talk is not 
prompted by a consuming self-love, but by a self- 
consuming love for his profession ; and his anger is 
stirred, not because his coworkers do not agree with 
him, but because of their stubborn and harmfully 
stupid opposition to all reform. A physician who 
happened at the same time to be a prig would not 
have acknowledged at Raffles' death that he had, 
after all, made a mistake. Your real prig never 
makes mistakes. 

As for Felix Holt and Adam Bede, more allowance 
must be made, because of their humbler stations in 
life, conversational self-restraint being not only a 
matter of grace but of gentle breeding also. If De- 
ronda and Lydgate had talked with the outspoken- 
ness of those two worthies, they could hardly have 
escaped this opprobrious title, which has been care- 
lessly given them by some. But to bestow it upon 
the honest wrath of the radical and the righteous 



2/8 George Eliot 

bluntness of the strong young carpenter is to take 
narrow views. Felix expressly tells Esther that he 
does not think himself better than others, that he 
does not blame others for not doing as he does ; but 
that he is nevertheless determined not to get entan- 
gled in affairs where he " must wink at dishonesty 
and pocket the proceeds, and justify that knavery as 
part of a system that" he "cannot alter." He sees 
that the old Catholics were right with their higher 
and lower rule, and that he is called upon to accept 
the higher. To some men appears " the strong 
angel with the implacable brow," and on his awful 
lips are written Goethe's words, " Renounce ! Thou 
must renounce ! " Felix Holt was one of those men. 
He says he will not be rich ; it is not his inward 
vocation. " Thousands of men have wedded poverty 
because they expect to go to heaven for it, but I wed 
it because it enables me to do what I most want to 
do on earth." And yet he fairly acknowledges that 
" some men do well to accept riches." Now, a prig, 
in dwelling on the superiority of his self-denial, 
would not have made this positive assertion that 
others do well in doing something that he was him- 
self above doing: he would have said "others may 
do well," with a hesitating accent on the conditional 
word. Felix is not addressing his working-men, 
remember, but pleading among the birches with the 
woman he loves, whom he is trying to raise from the 
plane of taste to the plane of thought, and who 
finally is raised by contact with his noble mind. His 
notion about cravats is merely the exaggerated em- 
phasis which a soul-stirring, mind-convincing, life- 
binding theory will lay upon details. It is a very 
great book, this ' Felix Holt,' because it throbs with 



Her Sympathy 279 

the vivifying truth that a man should stay in his 
place to accompHsh his purpose ; and differentiates 
for ail time a genuine and a fictitious, a moral and 
a political, radicalism. Felix belongs to the people. 
God has given him gifts. He intends, please God, 
to use them for the people. Who cares whether he 
wears cravats or not? ^ 

Scepticism has its advantages. In unexpected 
ways it is the servant of an exalted ideality in its 
searching distrust of " practical " measures which fail 
to touch the hidden sores. * Felix Holt ' is a politi- 
cal novel in the best sense, in which sense it is, with 
the exception of * Alton Locke ' and ' Les Miserables,' 
the only political novel in existence. Its politics 
are subordinated to a philosophical idealism. Its 
hero is a literal radical because he aims at a literal 
reform. One has only to contrast the talk of the 
trades-union speaker at the Duffield hustings with 
Felix's ringing charges to understand this vital dis- 
tinction. The one wants power through the ballot; 
the other carefully distinguishes between ignorant 
and instructed power, and shows that the ballot, un- 
der existing circumstances, would only increase the 
misery. What he is aiming at is to force public 
opinion, " the greatest power under heaven," into 
proper views of the labor problem, knowing that 
without that the ballot is a mere mischief-maker. 
Class elevation is the desideratum, — moral conversion, 
not political change. Herein is the Comptist faith, 
once more, and the faith of all moral enthusiasts as 

1 When one remembers the starched towels men wrapped around 
their necks in those days and called them cravats, one is ready to 
acknowledge that there may have been more of common-sense than 
stubbornness in Felix's position. 



2 8o George Eliot 

against the mechanical legislative efforts of Saint- 
Simonism and worse. 

With this should be read the expansion of the idea 
in the ' Address to Working-men by Felix Holt,' 
printed in the ' Essays;' where, basing the argument 
on the recognized principle of Trades-unionism, 
the author proves that society can only prosper 
when its members consider the general good as well 
as their own. This ' Address ' covers the Reform of 
^^Jy while the story belongs to the stirring days of '32. 
The ' Address ' is a postscript, emphasizing what 
the novel sets forth ; and its publication shows that 
its author did not intend the latter to be merely a vivid 
picture of a certain period : with her usual thorough- 
ness, she made that merely the milieu for ideas cov- 
ering all periods. That ' Felix Holt' did not close in 
a blaze of victory is not because of any heavy-hearted 
despair as to the ultimate triumph of justice: such a 
tone would have been foolishly optimistic in the light 
of observation. Moral changes come slowly, and are 
not generally discernible in any one lifetime. 

Here is George Eliot's radicalism, — a pure radi- 
calism, a radical radicalism ; ^ having the strong sup- 
port of a thinker like John Stuart Mill, who always 
maintained that the ballot alone would not serve. 
See how such radicalism is really conservatism, in 
that while striking at the root of acknowledged evil, 
it aims at conserving what is good in the old, in pre- 
serving it from a less complete radicalism, which would 
in destroying it only give birth to a worse new. See 
the true artist nature at work with the nature of the real 

1 Unlike her Spike, in ' Theophrastus,' to whom the epithet was 
applied very unfairly, " as he never went to the root of anything." 



Her Sympathy 281 

radical. The book might just as well have been 
called ' Felix Holt the Conservative,' 

Contrasted with Harold's political radicalism, what 
Felix advocates is as gold with dross. Compared 
with Esther, refined as we see her at last by Felix, 
Harold and his social superiority are the vulgar real- 
ities, not the absence of cravats in Felix's bureau ; 
and as mistress of Transome Court, this woman would 
have ranked below the wife of Felix Holt. 

It is an important point, because if George Eliot's 
strongest characters are really prigs, how can we 
sympathize with her sympathy for them? Indeed, 
there is only one prig in these fictions, and that is 
Tom Tulliver. It is natural for the average boy of 
strong integrity and with a love of justice in him to be 
a prig; for such a boy is, almost inevitably, an egoist, 
inasmuch as he has not reached the age of opinions 
toned down by extenuating circumstances. Tom Tul- 
liver is the natural boy, — perhaps we should say the 
natural Anglo-Saxon boy, of high courage and true, 
brave principles, with a lingering touch of the savage, 
and blind to all subtle distinctions between shades of 
Right and Wrong. It is a part of the fineness of 
George Eliot's art that he should be made a prig — 
he would not be typical else; and this emphasizes 
once more the claim that Daniel Deronda is not, and 
never was, a prig, because in the sketch of his early 
years, there is a notable absence of this characteristic 
bullyragging of boyhood. He was distinguishable 
from the average boy, in other words, by the absence 
of priggishness, which is the characteristic of typical 
boyhood. 



282 George Eliot 



VI 

This strength of entrance into the hearts of others 
through the door of sympathy is effected with tender- 
footed sureness where the tread is most apt to be 
either too heavy or too light. It is a pity that 
George EHot never wrote a book for children, because 
she understood them, — this childless woman. She 
could stoop to their intelligence without lowering 
her own ; she could unbend and yet stand straight. 
Witness the delightful Garth children, and the scene 
at the Vincy's New Year party, when Mr. Farebrother 
" dramatized an intense interest " in Mary's story of 
Rumpelotiltskin, and preached his little sermon against 
cakes, how they were bad things, especially if they 
were sweet and had plums in them, — a little to 
Louisa's alarm, who " took the affair rather seriously." 
We have often to apply the word " Shaksperean " to 
phases of George Eliot's power ; in her portrayal of 
child-life she surpasses Shakspere. Her boys and 
girls are not a lump sum ticketed " children," like a 
dozen specimens of a certain species of beetle in a nat- 
ural history collection ; but are just as much individu- 
alized as are her adults. Harry Transome, for ex- 
ample, is as different, in his petty, spiteful cruelties, 
from Tom Tulliver in his young English savagery, as 
the fathers of each are different; and one sees at 
once the insight of Lady Debarry's remark that Harry 
was not the child of a lady. The ' Mill on the Floss' 
is the one complete idyll in literature of this world of 
childhood, this microcosm of a world, with an order 
and growth of its own, repaying a loving study with 



Her Sympathy 283 

views into depths which, alas ! are not often sounded 
at later stages. 

Through the children our hearts are opened to the 
elders, just as they are in ** real life," as we say, — as 
if a fine novel was not real life. The magician waves 
her wand at the outset over Mr. Gilfil : 

Thus in Shepperton this breach with Mr. Oldinport 
tended only to heighten that good understanding which the 
Vicar had always enjoyed with the rest of his parishioners, 
from the generation whose children he had christened a 
quarter of a century before, down to that hopeful genera- 
tion represented by little Tommy Bond, who had recently 
quitted frocks and trousers for the severe simplicity of a 
tight suit of corduroys, relieved by numerous brass buttons. 
Tommy was a saucy boy, impervious to all impressions of 
reverence, and excessively addicted to humming-tops and 
marbles, with which recreative resources he was in the 
habit of immoderately distending the pockets of his cordu- 
roys. One day, spinning his top on the garden-walk, and 
seeing the Vicar advance directly towards it, at that excit- 
ing moment when it was beginning to " sleep " magnifi- 
cently, he shouted out with all the force of his lungs, 
" Stop ! don't knock my top down, now ! " From that 
day " little Corduroys " had been an especial favorite with 
Mr. Gilfil, who delighted to provoke his ready scorn and 
wonder by putting questions which gave Tommy the 
meanest opinion of his intellect. 

" Well, little Corduroys, have they milked the geese 
to-day?" 

" Milked the geese ! Why, they don't milk the geese ; 
ye 'r silly ! " 

" No ! dear heart ! why, how do the goslings live, then ? " 

The nutriment of goslings rather transcending Tommy's 
observations in natural history, he feigned to understand 



284 George Eliot 

the question in an exclamatory rather than an interrogatory 
sense, and became absorbed in winding up his top. 

" Ah, I see you don't know how the goslings live ! But 
did you notice how it rained sugar-plums yesterday?" 
(Here Tommy became attentive.) " Why, they fell into 
my pocket as I rode along. You look into my pocket and 
see if they did n't." 

Tommy, without waiting to discuss the alleged antece- 
dent, lost no time in ascertaining the presence of the agree- 
able consequent, for he had a well-founded belief in the 
advantages of diving into the Vicar's pocket. Mr. Gilfil 
called it his wonderful pocket, because, as he delighted to 
tell the " young shavers " and " two-shoes " — so he called 
all little boys and girls — whenever he put pennies into it, 
they turned into sugar-plums or gingerbread,, or some other 
nice thing. Indeed, little Bessie Parrot, a flaxen-headed 
" two-shoes," very white and fat as to her neck, always had 
the admirable directness and sincerity to salute him with 
the question, "What zoo dot in zoo pottet?" 

With such an auspicious opening, we could have 
found it in our hearts to have forgiven the old parson 
any number of faults. 

Mrs. Holt, in a flash, becomes something more to 
us than a humorous mass of foibles by the motherly 
longings awakened by Felix's attitude towards little 
Job Tudge. 

"Where does Job Tudge live?" she said, still sitting, 
and looking at the droll little figure, set off by a ragged 
jacket with a tail about two inches deep sticking out above 
the funniest of corduroys. 

" Job has two mansions," said Felix. " He lives here 
chiefly ; but he has another home, where his grandfather, 
Mr. Tudge, the stone-breaker, lives. My mother is very 



Her Sympathy 285 

good to Job, Miss Lyon. She has made him a little bed 
in a cupboard, and she gives him sweetened porridge." 

The exquisite goodness implied in these words of Felix 
impressed Esther the more, because in her hearing his talk 
had usually been pungent and denunciatory. Looking at 
Mrs, Holt, she saw that her eyes had lost their bleak 
northeasterly expression, and were shining with some mild- 
ness on little Job, who had turned round toward her, 
propping his head against Felix. 

"Well, why shouldn't I be motherly to the child. Miss 
Lyon?" said Mrs. Holt, whose strong powers of argument 
required the file of an imagined contradiction, if there were 
no real one at hand. " I never was hard-hearted, and I 
never will be. It was Felix picked the child up and took 
to him, you may be sure, for there 's nobody else master 
where he is ; but I was n't going to beat the orphin child 
and abuse him because of that, and him as straight as an 
arrow when he 's stripped, and me so fond of children, and 
only had one of my own to live. I 'd three babies, Miss 
Lyon, but the blessed Lord only spared Felix, and him the 
masterfulest and the brownest of 'em all. But I did my 
duty by him, and I said, he '11 have more schooling than 
his father, and he '11 grow up a doctor, and marry a woman 
with money to furnish — as I was myself, spoons and every 
thing — and I shall have the grandchildren to look up to 
me, and be drove out in the gig sometimes, like old Mrs. 
Lukyn. And you see what it 's all come to, Miss Lyon : 
here 's Felix made a common man of himself, and says 
he '11 never be married — which is the most unreasonable 
thing, and him never easy but when he 's got the child on 
his lap, or when — " 

"Stop, stop, mother," Felix burst in; "pray don't use 
that limping argument again — that a man should marry 
because he 's fond of children. That 's a reason for not 
marrying. A bachelor's children are always young ; they 're 



286 George Eliot 

immortal children — always lisping, waddling, helpless, and 
with a chance of turning out good." 

" The Lord above may know what you mean ! And 
have n't other folks' children a chance of turning out 
good?" 

" Oh, they grow out of it very fast. Here 's Job Tudge, 
now," said Felix, turning the little one round on his knee, 
and holding his head by the back ; " Job's limbs will get 
lanky; this little fist, that looks like a puff-ball, and can 
hide nothing bigger than a gooseberry, will get large and 
bony, and perhaps want to clutch more than its share ; 
these wide blue eyes that tell me more truth than Job 
knows, will narrow and narrow, and try to hide truth that 
Job would be better without knowing ; this little negative 
nose will become long and self- asserting ; and this little 
tongue — put out thy tongue. Job " — Job, awe-struck under 
this ceremony, put out a little red tongue very timidly — 
" this tongue, hardly bigger than a rose-leaf, will get large and 
thick, wag out of season, do mischief, brag and cant for 
gain or vanity, and cut as cruelly, for all its clumsiness, as 
if it were a sharp-edged blade. Big Job will perhaps be 
naughty — " As Felix, speaking with the loud emphatic 
distinctness habitual to him, brought out this terribly 
familiar word. Job's sense of mystification became too 
painful : he hung his lip, and began to cry. 

" See there," said Mrs. Holt, " you 're frightening the 
innicent child with such talk — and it 's enough to frighten 
them that thinks themselves the safest." 

" Look here. Job, my man," said Fehx, setting the boy 
down and turning him toward Esther ; " go to Miss Lyon, 
ask her to smile at you, and that will dry up your tears like 
the sunshine." 

"The question of beauty," says Emerson, "takes 
us out of surfaces to thinking of the foundations of 



Her Sympathy 287 

things. The tint of the flower proceeds from its root." 
The foundation of * Silas Marner ' is the beauty of a 
sweet human interest filling a heart made vacant by 
the destruction of what that heart held dear, and 
which, base as it was, it had clung to in the death of 
affection brought about by a treachery which its 
simplicity accepted as the knell of all human inter- 
course and love. And the change is wrought 
by a little child. "And a little child shall lead 
them." 

I once heard a physician say that a child's illness 
calls for more science and skill than an adult's, be- 
cause the symptoms must be discerned without verbal 
hints from the patient. In George Eliot we repose 
the kind of faith we place in the old family doctor 
whom we call in when anxious about the baby's 
health. One feels that there will be no mistake in 
diagnosis, and that right treatment will follow. Dor- 
othea's hands were " powerful, feminine, maternal." 
Mark the ascending emphasis : it describes George 
Eliot's attitude towards children; and hence the 
mother's instinct in this woman, who never was a 
mother, except in the sense that Felix Holt was a 
father. 

She went on willingly, singing with ready memory vari- 
ous thing by Gordigiani and Schubert ; then, when she had 
left the piano, Mab said, entreatingly, " Oh, Mirah, if you 
would not mind singing the little hymn." 

" It is too childish," said Mirah. " It is like lisping." 

" What is the hymn? " said Deronda. 

" It is the Hebrew hymn she remembers her mother 
singing over her when she lay in her cot," said Mrs. 
Meyrick. 



288 George Eliot 

" I should like very much to hear it," said Deronda, " if 
you think I am worthy to hear what is so sacred." 

" I will sing it if you like," said Mirah, " but I don't 
sing real words — only here and there a syllable like hers 
— the rest is lisping. Do you know Hebrew? because if 
you do, my singing will seem childish nonsense." 

Deronda shook his head. " It will be quite good Hebrew 
to me." 

Mirah crossed her little hands and feet in her easiest 
attitude, and then lifted up her head at an angle which 
seemed to be directed to some invisible face bent over her, 
while she sung a little hymn of quaint melancholy intervals, 
with syllables that really seemed childish lisping to her 
audience ; but the voice in which she gave it forth had 
gathered even a sweeter, more cooing tenderness than was 
heard in her other songs. 

" If I were ever to know the real words, I should still go 
on in my old way with them," said Mirah, when she had re- 
peated the hymn several times. 

" Why not?" said Deronda. "The lisped syllables are 
full of meaning." 

" Yes, indeed," said Mrs. Meyrick. " A mother hears 
something like a lisp in her children's talk to the very last. 
Their words are not just what everybody else says, though 
they may be spelt the same. If I were to live till my Hans 
got old, I should still see the boy in him. A mother's love, 
I often say, is like a tree that has got all the wood in it 
from the very first it made." 

" Is not that the way with friendship, too ? " said 
Deronda, smiling. " We must not let mothers be too 
arrogant." 

The bright little woman shook her head over her darning. 

" It is easier to find an old mother than an old friend. 
Friendships begin with liking or gratitude — roots that can 
be pulled up. Mother's love begins deeper down." 



Her Sympathy 289 

Probably Mr. Brooke, were he brought into the 
talk at this point, would say: "Well, but dogs, now, 
and that sort of thing. I had it myself, that love 
of dogs. I went a good deal into that at one 
time. But a man can go too far. Too far, you 
know." I certainly do not wish to go too far in 
pursuit of any theory, nor to substantiate any 
theory from unsubstantial facts. But would not my 
medical friend be justified in extending his belief 
in the finer science needed for the treatment of chil- 
dren to the so-called dumb animals, and find the 
science requisite there equally fine? Veterinary sur- 
gery seems to have gone down in the general moral 
wreck with everything connected with kennels and 
stables, and one rarely hears of a horse doctor leading 
a cotillon. But there ought to be no grander pro- 
fession in the world ; and it fits in with the Positivist 
belief to care for living things considered positively, 
and not relatively in regard to some future life. Mr. 
Buchanan tells of the indignation with which George 
Eliot once met his reference to the necessarily short 
life allotted to her splendid bull-terrier, as if it were 
cruel to deny to the lower what we affirm of the 
higher animals.^ At all events, I am sure that her 
love for dogs sprang from the same source as her love 
for children; and what makes her domestic scenes 
so complete is her inclusion of this noble friend of 
man among the familiar pictures of her country life. 

1 ' A Look Around Literature,' pp. 218 seq. But reports of con- 
versations — especially such conversations — should always be read 
with some doubt as to precise accuracy. Memory is notably tricky, 
and in the heat of controversial talk much is struck off which would 
be modified if the thought of perpetuity in print were considered. 
If only tones, gestures, laughter, tears could be reported! Without 
them as interpreters, the text remains imperfect. 

19 



290 George Eliot 

There are several well-known dogs in fiction, — nota- 
bly Bill Sikes's Bull's-eye and the noble staghound 
of 'The Talisman,' to say nothing of the immortal 
Rab. But nearly every character of George Eliot's 
making is intimately associated with this " friend 
of man." 

The last time I made my journey through the 
novels I kept tally of the number of dogs desiring my 
further acquaintance there; and unless I have over- 
looked some of them, there are fifty-five, divided as 
follows : eight spaniels, three bull-terriers, four ter- 
riers, three bloodhounds, three setters, two bulldogs, 
one sheepdog, two shepherds, two Newfoundlands, 
two King Charles, two pointers, two water-spaniels, 
one pug, two maltese, one turn-spit, two black-and- 
tans, one deerhound, one staghound, one Blenheim, 
one retriever, one St. Bernard, one mastiff, one half- 
mastiff, half-bull, one unspecified " Fido," one mongrel, 
one black cur, belonging to the gypsies, in 'Mill on 
the Floss,' and five other undesignated animals. Am 
I not safe in venturing the assertion that there is no 
category in any other writer even faintly approaching 
this? 

And the same cleverness is shown in the invention, 
or, let us s-ay, the discovery, of their names, as we 
saw before when considering their masters. The sol- 
emn mastiff of mine host in the 'Spanish Gypsy' 
is appropriately called Seneca, and Mary Garth's 
black-and-tan answers when you address him as Fly. 
Mr. Brooke's St. Bernard is Monk, and the deer- 
hound is Fleet. A King Charles suggests Minny, 
and Mumps seems natural to any dog Bob Jakin 
might own. She is full also of indirect references. 
She confesses to the same kind of sympathy for un- 



Her Sympathy 291 

gainly people that she has for mongrels : the finely- 
bred dogs any one can love. Caterina is represented 
as following Gilfil like a Blenheim spaniel trotting 
after a large setter. Gwendolen wheels away from 
Lush as if he had been a muddy hound. Maggie is 
on the watch — don't you see her? — like a skye- 
terrier ; and in another place, is " shaking the water 
from her black locks like a skye-terrier escaped from 
his bath," Hans Meyrick is humorously reminded 
by the child Jacob, in relation to Mirah, of dogs that 
have been brought up by women and are manageable 
by them only. 

She enters into their thoughts, — that is, she inter- 
prets what seem to be their thoughts, with a sym- 
pathy which brings laughter and tears. Mr. Gilfil's 
loneliness is shared with no other society than that 
of the brown old setter, Ponto, " who, stretched out 
at full length on the rug with his nose between his 
forepaws, would wrinkle his brows and lift up his eye- 
lids every now and then, to exchange a glance of 
mutual understanding with his master." When Cat- 
erina started out on her journey to Mosslands, she 
was met at the door by " Rupert, the old blood- 
hound stationed on the mat, with the determination 
that the first person who was sensible enough to take 
a walk that morning should have the honor of his 
approbation and society." 

As he thrust his great black and tawny head under her 
hand, and wagged his tail with vigorous eloquence, and 
reached the climax of his welcome by jumping up to lick 
her face, which was at a convenient licking height for him, 
Caterina felt quite grateful to the old dog for his friend- 
liness. Animals are such agreeable friends. They ask no 
questions ; they pass no criticisms. 



292 George Eliot 

And the last touch in the death scene of Anthony 
is given to this grand old Rupert. Sir Christopher 
is hurrying as fast as he can to where the body of 
Anthony has been found, and where the dog already 
is beside it. " He comes back and licks the old 
baronet's hand, as if to say ' Courage ! ' and is then 
down again snuffing the body." 

Rupert was there, too, waiting and watching ; licking first 
the dead and then the living hands ; then running off 
on Mr. Bates's track, as if he would follow and hasten his 
return, but in a moment turning back again, unable to quit 
the scene of his master's sorrow. 

Faithful unto death ! 

What a charming introduction to Mr, Irwine's 
home, which we are invited to enter, very softly, 
" without awaking the glossy brown setter who is 
stretched across the hearth, with her two puppies 
beside her; or the pug who is dozing with his black 
muzzle aloft like a sleepy president " ! The setter's 
name is Juno, and presently we see her wagging 
her tail " with calm, matronly pleasure ; " and when 
Arthur comes in, mingled with the confusion of 
greetings and handshakings are " the joyous short 
barks and wagging of tails on the part of the canine 
members of the family, which tells that the visitor is 
on the best terms with the visited." The Poysers* 
chained bulldog performs " a Pyrrhic dance " as the 
parson and the captain leave the farm-yard, his 
peculiar bulldog frame of mind at such an intrusion 
being expressed by " furious indignation." Adam's 
Gyp is one of the characters in the story, and it is 
noticeable that he does not bark, but howls, at the 



Her Sympathy 293 

mysterious rapping at the door, the night of old 
Bede's death. None but a close student of dogs 
would have mentioned that. 

George Eliot has a very deep feeling for this 
" dumb " animal, who is not dumb at all. 

" Poor dog ! " said Dinah, patting the rough gray coat ; 
" I 've a strange feeling about the dumb things, as if they 
wanted to speak, and it was a trouble to 'em because they 
could n't. I can't help being sorry for the dogs always, 
though perhaps there 's no need. But they may well have 
more in them than they know how to make us understand, 
for we can't say half what we feel with our words." 

The finished fascination of his air came chiefly from the 
absence of demand and assumption. It was that of a fleet, 
soft-coated, dark-eyed animal that delights you by not 
bounding away in indifference from you, and unexpectedly 
pillows its chin on your palm, and looks up at you desiring 
to be stroked — as if it loved you. 

And she makes them enter into your feelings for 
the moment, as a dog always will if you give him 
half a chance. 

The sun was already breaking out ; the sound of the mill 
seemed cheerful again ; the granary doors were open ; and 
there was Yap, the queer white-and-brown terrier, with one 
ear turned back, trotting about and sniffing vaguely, as if 
he were in search of a companion. It was irresistible. 
Maggie tossed her hair back and ran downstairs, seized 
her bonnet without putting it on, peeped, and then dashed 
along the passage, lest she should encounter her mother, 
and was quickly out in the yard, whirling round like a 
Pythoness, and singing as she whirled, " Yap, Yap, Tom 's 



294 George Eliot 

coming home ! " while Yap danced and barked round her, 
as much as to say, if there was any noise wanted he was 
the dog for it. 

Her dogs are always true to their best dog-nature, 
even when her men and women are not true to their 
best human nature. 

Snuff, the brown spaniel, who had placed herself in front 
of him, and had been watching him for some time, now 
jumped up in impatience for the expected caress. But 
Godfrey thrust her away without looking at her, and left the 
room, followed humbly by the unresenting Snuff, — perhaps 
because she saw no other career open to her. 

When Lydgate, in one of those involuntarily awkward 
actions assumed in angry moods, " stooped to beckon 
the tiny black spaniel," that wise creature " had the 
insight to decline his hollow caresses." 

Yes, and artistically true, too. Mrs. Transome's 
sleepy old and fat Blenheim is as appropriate to her 
as the fine black retriever who guards Mr. Transome 
(and who barks " anxiously," another fine touch of 
observation of an aged dog) is to him ; and one can- 
not think of the sporting parson uncle without think- 
ing at the same time of the black and liver-spotted 
pointers over whom he shot. " Little Treby had a 
new rector," she says, near the close of the book, 
" and more were sorry besides the old pointers." 
You see, the dogs come in among the final touches, 
as they should. The King Charles puppy belonging 
to little Harry, " with big eyes, much after the pat- 
tern of the boy's," is as much a part of the boy as his 
clothes, to say nothing of the black spaniel Moro, 
whom he dragged about, tied to the seat of a toy 



Her Sympathy 295 

wagon, "with a piece of scarlet drapery round him, 
making him look like a barbaric prince in a chariot." 
The contrast of dogs is as clever as that of the other 
characters. 

More, having little imagination, objected to this, and 
barked with feeble snappishness as the tyrannous lad ran 
forward, then whirled the chariot round, and ran back to 
" Gappa," then came to a dead stop, which overset the 
chariot, that he might watch Uncle Lingon's water-spaniel 
run for the hurled stick and bring it in his mouth. Nimrod 
kept close to his old master's legs, glancing with much in- 
difference at this youthful ardor about sticks, — he had 
*' gone through all that ; " and Dominic walked by, looking 
on blandly, and taking care of both young and old. 

Presently Mrs. Holt, with little Job, advances upon 
this group. 

She courtesied once, as if to the entire group, now 
including even the dogs, who showed various degrees of 
curiosity, especially as to what kind of game the smaller 
animal Job might prove to be, after due investigation. 

Bob Jakin declares he 's getting so full of money 
he must have a wife to spend it for him. " But it 's 
botherin', a wife is; and Mumps mightn't like her." 
When Stephen struck the deep notes which repre- 
sent the tread of the heavy beasts in ' The Creation,* 
Minny, the King Charles, — 

who had intrenched himself, trembling, in his basket as 
soon as the music began, found this thunder so little to his 
taste that he leaped out and scampered under the remotest 
chiffoniere, as the most eligible place in which a small dog 
could await the crack of doom. 



296 George Eliot 

" Happen you 'd like Mumps for company, Miss," he 
said, when he had taken the baby again. " He 's rare 
company, Mumps is ; he knows iverything, an' makes no 
bother about it. If I tell him, he '11 lie before you an' 
watch you — as still — just as he watches my pack. You 'd 
better leave him a bit ; he '11 get fond on you, Lors, it 's 
a fine thing to hev a dumb brute fond on you ; it '11 stick 
to you, and make no jaw." 

Just as our hatred of Sikes is heightened by his 
treatment of Bull's-eye, so is the refined cruelty of 
Grandcourt made more loathsome by the trouble he 
takes to torment his " pets." 

Mr. Grandcourt had drawn his chair aside so as to face 
the lawn, and with his left leg over another chair, and his 
right elbow on the table, was smoking a large cigar, while 
his companion was still eating. The dogs — half a dozen 
of various kinds were moving lazily in and out, or taking 
attitudes of brief attention — gave a vacillating preference 
first to one gentleman, then to the other ; being dogs in 
such good circumstances that they could play at hunger, 
and liked to be served with delicacies which they declined 
to put into their mouths ; all except Fetch, the beautiful 
liver-colored water-spaniel, which sat with its forepaws 
firmly planted and its expressive brown face turned upward, 
watching Grandcourt with unshaken constancy. He held 
in his lap a tiny maltese dog with a tiny silver collar and 
bell, and when he had a hand unused by cigar or coffee- 
cup, it rested on this small parcel of animal warmth. I 
fear that Fetch was jealous, and wounded that her master 
gave her no word or look ; at last it seemed that she could 
bear this neglect no longer, and she gently put her large 
silky paw on her master's leg. Grandcourt looked at her 
with unchanged face for half a minute, and then took the 
trouble to lay down his cigar while he lifted the unimpas- 



Her Sympathy 297 

sioned Fluff dose to his chin and gave it caressing pats, all 
the while gravely watching Fetch, who, poor thing, whim- 
pered interruptedly, as if trying to repress that sign of dis- 
content, and at last rested her head beside the appealing 
paw, looking up with piteous beseeching. So, at least, a 
lover of dogs must have interpreted Fetch, and Grandcourt 
kept so many dogs that he was reputed to love them ; at 
any rate, his impulse to act just in this way started from 
such an interpretation. But when the amusing anguish 
burst forth in a howling bark, Grandcourt pushed Fetch 
down without speaking, and depositing Fluff carelessly on 
the table (where his black nose predominated over a salt- 
cellar), began to look to his cigar, and found, with some 
annoyance against Fetch as the cause, that the brute of a 
cigar required relighting. Fetch, having begun to wail, 
found, like others of her sex, that it was not easy to leave 
off; indeed, the second howl was a louder one, and the 
third was like unto it. 

*' Turn out that brute, will you ? " said Grandcourt to Lush. 

There is no domestic scene without them ; they 
are a part of the landscape. The first thing that 
Dorothea discovers, looking abroad on the dawning 
day after her night of anguish, is the shepherd with 
his dog. 

And not only dogs. Bob Jakin is described as 
regarding Maggie " with the pursuant gaze of an 
intelligent dumb animal with perceptions more per- 
fect than his comprehension." It is not only the 
" bouquet of young faces " around the Meyrick's tea- 
table that we are invited to inspect. There is Hafiz, 
the cat, " seated a little aloft, with large eyes on the 
alert, regarding the whole scene as an apparatus for 
supplying his allowance of milk." 

Let us close with this bit of domesticity : 



298 George Eliot 

Eppie was now aware that her behaviour was under 
observation, but it was only the observation of a friendly 
donkey, browsing with a log fastened to his foot — a meek 
donkey, not scornfully critical of human trivialities, but 
thankful to share in them, if possible, by getting his nose 
scratched ; and Eppie did not fail to gratify him with her 
usual notice, though it was attended with the inconvenience 
of his following them, painfully, up to the very door of 
their home. 

But the sound of a sharp bark inside, as Eppie put the 
key in the door, modified the donkey's views, and he limped 
away again without bidding. The sharp bark was the sign 
of an excited welcome that was awaiting them from a 
knowing brown terrier, who after dancing at their legs in a 
hysterical manner, rushed with a worrying noise at a tor- 
toise-shell kitten under the loom, and then rushed back 
with a sharp bark again, as much as to say, " I have done 
my duty by this feeble creature, you perceive ; " while the 
lady-mother of the kitten sat sunning her white bosom in 
the window, and looked around with a sleepy air of ex- 
pecting caresses, though she was not going to take any 
trouble for them. 

VII 

Although we know from her letters* that George 
Eliot did not regard the clergy, as a class, with 
extraordinary affection, her fairmindedness was not 
warped from a generous consideration of such of 
them as individually came within the scope of her 
creations. She purposely picked out the best; and 
whatever weaknesses they have are all on the side of 
humanity, are the weaknesses they share with laymen, 
and are not particularly the vices of a sect, — which 
1 * Life,' vol. i., p. 31. 



Her Sympathy 299 

would have made them objects of ridicule rather than 
subjects for sympathy. She makes their weaknesses 
fit into the scenery ; and to be able to do that is a 
gift of God. Bnt she probes far deeper than that ; 
for with all their amiability, they are not — the best 
of them — weak men, but firm and strong upon occa- 
sion. They rise to their opportunities ; they meet 
the crises like true priests. 

That rich Velasquez portrait of Mr. Irwine is the 
speaking likeness of the genial gentleman, dignified 
by natural grace and the gentleness of birth, which we 
like to associate with the other rich belongings of the 
Established Church. Mr. Irwine lived before the days 
of" Settlements" and guilds, and perhaps would not 
have been happy amidst the busy activities of a 
latter-day city parish. But he was of more real use- 
fulness in the quiet rusticity of his setting than his 
successor, Mr. Ryde, who was, without doubt, more 
" zealous," but who, in the language of Mrs. Poyser, 
" was like a dose of physic. He gripped you and 
worrited you, and after all he left you much the 
same." And the faces of the people of Broxton 
and Hayslope did not brighten at the approach of 
Mr. Ryde, as they did when Mr. Irwine met them on 
the highway. They learned a good deal more about 
doctrines from Mr. Ryde, but less about feelings ; 
and the farmers did not look forward to their Sundays 
with the pleasure they had when Mr. Irwine " filled 
the pulpit," and talked to them about the things 
they understood. 

" Mr. Ryde was a deal thought on at a distance, I believe, 
and he wrote books; but as for mathmatics and the 
natur' o' things, he was as ignorant as a woman. He was 



300 George Eliot 



very knowing about doctrines, and used to call 'em the 
bulwarks of the Reformation ; but I 've always mistrusted 
that sort o' learning as leaves folks foolish and unreasonable 
about business. Now Mester Irwine was as different as 
could be : as quick ! — he understood what you meant in a 
minute ; and he knew all about building and could see 
when you 'd made a good job. And he behaved as much 
like a gentleman to the farmers, and th' old women and 
the laborers, as he did to the gentry. You never saw him 
interfering and scolding, and trying to play th' emperor. 
Ah ! he was a fine man as ever you set eyes on ; and so 
kind to 's his mother and sisters. That poor sickly Miss 
Anne — he seemed to think more of her than of anybody 
else in the world. There was n't a soul in the parish had a 
word to say against him ; and his servants stayed with him 
till they were so old and pottering he had to hire other 
folks to do their work." 

" Well," I said, " that was an excellent way of preaching 
in the week-days ; but I dare say, if your old friend Mr. 
Irwine were to come to life again, and get into the pulpit 
next Sunday, you would be rather ashamed that he did n't 
preach better after all your praise of him." 

" Nay, nay," said Adam, broadening his chest and throw- 
ing himself back in his chair, as if he were ready to meet all 
inferences, " nobody has ever heard me say Mr. Irwine was 
much of a preacher. He did n't go into deep speritial expe- 
rience ; and I know there 's a deal in a man's inward life 
as you can't measure by the square, and say ' Do this and 
that '11 follow,' and ' Do that and this 'II follow.' There 's 
things go on in the soul, and times when feelings come 
into you like a rushing mighty wind, as the Scripture says, 
and part your life in two a'most, so as you look back on 
yourself as if you was somebody else. Those are things as 
you can't bottle up in a ' do this ' and ' do that ; ' and I '11 
go so far with the strongest Methodist ever you '11 find. 



Her Sympathy 301 

That shows me there 's deep speritial things in reHgion. 
You can't make much out wi' talking about it but you feel 
it. Mr. Irwine did n't go into those things : he preached 
short moral sermons and that was all. But then he acted 
up pretty much to what he said ; he did n't set up for 
being so different from other folks one day, and then be as 
like 'em as two peas the next. And he made folks love 
him and respect him, and that was better nor stirring up 
their gall wi' being over-busy. ... I began to see as all 
this weighing and sifting what this text means and that 
text means, and whether folks are saved all by God's grace, 
or whether there goes an ounce o' will to 't was no part o' real 
reHgion at all. You may talk o' these things for hours on 
end, and you '11 only be all the more coxy and conceited 
for't. So I took to going nowhere but to church, and 
hearing nobody but Mr. Irwine, for he said nothing but 
what was good, and what you 'd be the wiser for remember- 
ing. And I found it better for my soul to be humble before 
the mysteries o' God's dealings, and not be making a clatter 
about what I could never understand. And they 're poor 
foolish questions, after all ; for what have we got either 
inside or outside of us but what comes from God ? If we' ve 
got a resolution to do right, he gave it to us, I reckon, first 
or last ; but I see plain enough we shall never do it without 
a resolution, and that 's enough for me." 

Yet vi'hen the tragedy of the story rises in over- 
flowing tide upon Adam, Irwine rises with it, and 
saves Adam from the drowning. 

Her disagreeable clergymen, like this Ryde, and 
Mr. Tyke, in ' Middlemarch,' are mentioned only 
incidentally, and do not figure in the story, except 
as foils to the agreeable ones, like Irwine and 
Farebrother. No one knew better than himself that 
Farebrother was far from being a model priest. 



302 George Eliot 

He does not scruple to play whist for the money 
which he needs; which, though not thought ill of 
in the days of Peel, is not what one expects of an 
exemplar in any day. Yet his very failings help 
towards his appreciation of the faults of others ; 
and a young man like Fred Vincy can go to him 
for advice and direction, who would nervously shrink 
from a " father confessor " who had learned everything 
about sin, not in life, but in a theological seminary. 
Could anything be finer than the picture of this 
high-toned, delicately organized Farebrother swallow- 
ing his own feelings and going to Mary Garth in 
behalf of a fellow not worthy to tie his shoestrings? 
Almost any boy in Middlemarch would have said of 
Farebrother, had you asked his opinion, that he was 
a tip-top fellow and a brick ; and a boy's opinion of a 
parson is not to be despised. 

She is equally fair to all her clergymen. There is 
the broad, tolerant Cadwallader, who thought no evil 
of Casaubon, because he was allowed to thrash his 
stream, and in whose study might be found, not tomes 
of Augustine, but all the latest fishing-tackle ; who 
always saw the joke of any satire against himself, and 
who was an all-round good fellow. Even Stephen 
Guest speaks well of the high-Church incumbent, 
Kenn. 

"I say anything disrespectful of Dr. Kenn? Heaven 
forbid ! ... I think Kenn one of the finest fellows in the 
world. I don't care much about the tall candlesticks he 
has put on the communion-table, and I should n't like to 
spoil my temper by getting up to early prayers every morn- 
ing. But he 's the only man I ever knew personally who 
seems to me to have anything of the real apostle in him — a 



Her Sympathy 303 

man who has eight hundred a year, and is contented with 
deal furniture and boiled beef because he gives away two- 
thirds of his income. That was a very fine thing of him — 
taking into his house that poor lad Grattan who shot his 
mother by accident. He sacrifices more time than a less 
busy man could spare, to save the poor fellow from getting 
into a morbid state of mind about it." 

Because this noble-minded woman loved goodness 
rather than any of the forms of goodness. You 
think of high motives, and not of high Church, when 
you think of Kenn ; just as you think of what is best 
in Evangelicalism, as part of what is best in all parties, 
rather than what is typically" Evangelical," when you 
think of Tryan ; and as you think of earnest striving 
for purity in the dissenting doctrines of Lyon, rather 
than the peculiar kind of purity associated with the 
idea of Puritanism ; and just as, finally, in regarding 
Dinah Morris, you do not think of the beauty of 
Methodism, but of the beauty of holiness. Her only 
partial failure among clergymen is Gwendolen's uncle, 
who is a little too much influenced by county super- 
stitions. Even he can rise nobly to his opportunities, 
but he should have looked more closely into Grand- 
court's past. He is a little too worldly, even for a 
worldly clergyman; and this very worldliness might 
have prevented Gwendolen's mistake better than the 
innocence of a less knowing priest. 

George Eliot did not care for the Jews especially, 
as such, although she thought them a fine old race, 
like the Florentines.^ She was fired with the idea of 

1 As such, indeed, they were nothing to her, and the gypsies were 
less than nothing [' Life,' vol. i-.'pp. 172 s^g.] It is a narrow criticism 
that finds fault with the gypsies in her poem because of their dis- 
similarity from the known article. They do not stand there for photo- 



304 George Eliot 

nationality ; and she failed, in ' Daniel Deronda ' and 
the ' Spanish Gypsy,' to see that Christianity was in- 
tended to swallow nationality in universality; that 
there was to be nothing in the new dispensation but 
new creatures — not new nations. Judaism is neces- 
sarily tribal ; there can be no converts to it. You 
may be converted to Christianity ; you must be born 
into Judaism. But conversion is a new birth. There 
is really no good reason why Lady Mallinger should 
provoke a smile by her suggestion that there was a 
society for the conversion of the Jews, except that 
most of Lady Mallinger's remarks were regarded as 
foolish, and that there is little tangible evidence that 
that society ever accomplishes anything. If the crea- 
tor of Daniel Deronda had been inspired by a con- 
vincing Christianity, she would have grafted her 
hero's sentiment for his hereditary people onto a 
Christian base. Yet Deronda, it should be remem- 
bered, did not renounce Christianity. He acknowl- 
edged that it, too, had claims upon him. It is open 
to the imagination that his final belief was not funda- 
mentally opposed to a religion that had been born 
anew, out of Judaism, under a standard destined to 
absorb all religions. 

Mordecai's doctrine is a sublimated Erastianism, a 
high-keyed nationalism resting upon a politico-moral, 
rather than on a religious basis. " Deronda," we 
learn, " like his neighbors, had regarded Judaism as a 
sort of eccentric fossilized form which an accomplished 
man might dispense with studying and leave to special- 
ists." But George Eliot, after her usual manner, re- 
graphic reproductions of a type, but are arbitrarily chosen as possible 
examples of truth to a national ideal. The actual gypsy is sketched 
in the ' Mill in the Floss.' 



Her Sympathy 305 

gards it from the standpoint of a Jew who still believes 
in his people ; and she makes Deronda anxious to 
feed his new interest by studying it from the inside. 
Mr. Jacobs says there is a notable array of Jews in 
' Daniel Deronda,' ^ and the book awoke the keenest 
sympathy among learned rabbis ; which certainly is a 
better proof that she wrote understandingly of them 
than the adverse criticism of those who have never 
approached, and can never approach, the field from 
any other than an anti-Jewish, or, at the best, a non- 
Jewish position. Think what we will of the futility of the 
main idea of the story, the character of Mordecai stands 
out in breathing colors ; and we are made to pity the 
abject hopelessness of his visions by the coarse unbelief 
of his surroundings. Is it not, for example, one of 
those over-shrewd mistakes of criticism to point out 
that the author erred in allowing Cohen to transact 
business on the eve of the Sabbath? Did she not 
purposely make him do so by way of emphasis on the 
infinite distance between the sordid conditions in the 
life of the typical money-making, money-lending Jew 
and the visions of her Mordecai — between those who 
held the ancient forms divorced from their spirit, and 
those who breathed the spirit which animated the 
forms? It seems, in truth, as though she viewed the 
theocracy of the Hebrews as on the same level with 
the nationalism of the Italians, and asks for them not 
a Messiah, but a Mazzini ; and it is a little typical that 
Mordecai himself is not orthodox: his quotations are 
not from the Old Testament, but from later writers. 
Still, the great tribute to the story is that eminent Jews 
to-day are endeavoring to establish in the East what 
Mordecai died with visions of in his throbbing brain, 

1 MacmillafCs, vol. xxxvi., p. loi. 
20 



;o6 George Eliot 



VIII 

George Eliot's wit, as I have said, is distributed 
among her characters: she washes her hands of it, 
so to say, and makes Mrs. Poyser and Mrs. Cadwal- 
lader stand for sponsors. It is different, however, 
with her humor; because the essential nature of 
humor agrees with such exquisite fitness with the 
deliberative qualities of her art that the portrayal 
is, in its sympathetic fulness, almost necessarily 
humorous. 

Humor is a part of sympathy ; it is sometimes its 
last touch; and it is connected with love through its 
kinship to pity. Wit flashes, humor glows; wit hurts, 
humor soothes ; wit is serious, humor gambols ; wit 
is swift, humor lingers ; wit is direct, honest, open ; 
humor is vague, sly, wandering; the weapon of wit is 
the rapier; humor has no weapon, but its shield is 
sympathy. Wit may be the mere product of a keen 
intelligence ; the leisurely qualities of humor make it 
a relative of intellectual culture. Hence it is natural 
that most of George Eliot's own talk, as distinct from 
the talk of her characters, should be humorous rather 
than witty. Take, for example : 

Mr. Barton was not at all an ascetic. He thought the 
benefits of fasting were entirely confined to the Old Testa- 
ment dispensation. 

. . . when Lady Assher, Beatrice, and Captain Wybrow 
entered, all with that brisk and cheerful air which a 
sermon is often observed to produce when it is quite 
finished. 



Her Sympathy 307 

The conversation is sometimes quite literary, for there is 
a flourishing book-club, and many of the younger ladies 
have carried their studies so far as to have forgotten a little 
German. 

Nothing like " taking " a few bushes and ditches for 
exorcising a demon ; and it is really astonishing that the 
centaurs, with their immense advantages in this way, have 
left us so bad a reputation in history. 

The woman who manages a dairy has a large share in 
making the rent, so she may well be allowed to have her 
opinion on stock and their " keep," — an excuse which 
strengthens her understanding so much that she finds her- 
self able to give her husband advice on most other subjects. 

The possession of a wife conspicuously one's inferior in 
intellect is, like other high privileges, attended with a few 
inconveniences, and among the rest, with the occasional 
necessity for using a little deception. 

He was unmarried, and had met all exhortations of friends 
who represented to him that a bishop — i. e., the overseer 
of an Independent church and congregation . . . 

Mr. Brooke felt so much surprise that he did not at once 
find out how much he was relieved by the sense that he was 
not expected to do anything in particular. 

. . . their opponents made use of the same writings for 
different ends, finding there a strong warrant for the divine 
right of kings and the denunciation of those who, like Korah, 
Dathan, and Abirarn, took on themselves the office of the 
priesthood which belonged of right solely to Aaron and 
his sons, or, in other words, to men ordained by the English 
bishops. 



308 George Eliot 

"An odd man," as Mrs. Muscat observed, " to have such 
a gift in the pulpit. But there 's One knows better than we 
do," — which in a lady who rarely felt her judgment at a 
loss, was a concession that showed much piety. 

, . . the Franciscans, who loved mankind, and hated 
the Dominicans. 

She was a great reader of news, from the widest-reach- 
ing politics to the list of marriages ; the latter, she said, 
giving her the pleasant sense of finishing the fashionable 
novels without having read them, and seeing the heroes 
and heroines happy without knowing what poor creatures 
they were. 

. . . the philanthropic banker, . . . who predominated 
so much in the town that some called him a Methodist, 
others a hypocrite, according to the resources of their 
vocabulary. 

They were saved from the excesses of Protestantism 
by not knowing how to read. 

Many of her opinions, such as those on church govern- 
ment and the character of Archbishop Laud, seemed too 
decided under every alteration to have been arrived at 
otherwise than by a wifely receptiveness. 

People who live at a distance are naturally less faulty 
than those immediately under our own eyes ; and it seems 
superfluous, when we consider the remote geographical 
position of the Ethiopians, and how very little the Greeks 
had to do with them, to inquire further why Homer 
calls them " blameless." 

The end of Brooke's pen is a " thinking organ ; " so 
she appropriately says : " His pen found it such a 
pity ..." 



Her Sympathy 309 

Humor calls for reflective rather than purely senti- 
mental characteristics. Not only in her power to 
delve below the surface, but in her self-restraint, in 
the deftness of her touch, in her admirable discretion, 
is she the superior of Dickens, who is too often a 
mere sentimentalist. George Eliot has not the trick 
of repeating, which the great humorist uses past all 
forbearance. She has, so far as the outward aspects 
of her humor are concerned, the Dickens stroke at 
its best, without any of its exaggerations. Her Mr. 
Brooke, her Trumbull, all her minor characters in 
* Middlemarch,' are bodied forth humorously, each 
with some characteristic, but never tiresomely reiter- 
ated note. She is a high, not a low, comedian, like 
Dickens. The memory of Trumbull, trimming his 
outlines, and uttering grandiloquent sentences, re- 
mains with the reader as perfect a bit of portraiture 
as the recollection of Silas Wegg, although the 
auctioneer occupies the stage not one-quarter the 
amount of time the other worthy holds it. Dalton, 
the Donnithorne's coachman, appears only once or 
twice, in * Adam Bede ' : 

" The cap'n 's been ridin' the devil's own pace," said 
Dalton the coachman — whose person stood out in high 
relief, as he smoked his pipe, against the stable wall — 
when John brought up Rattler. 

"An' I wish he 'd get the devil to do 's grooming for 'n," 
growled John. 

" Ay ; he 'd hev a deal hamabler groom nor what he 
has now," observed Dalton ; and the joke appeared to 
him so good that, being left alone upon the scene, he 
continued at intervals to take his pipe from his mouth 
in order to wink at an imaginary audience, and shake 



3IO George Eliot 

luxuriously with a silent, ventral laughter; mentally re- 
hearsing the dialogue from the beginning, that he might 
recite it with effect in the servants' hall. 

The creator of Sam Weller would have been so de- 
lighted with this Dalton that in his hands we should 
have had, instead of that single winking, many repe- 
titions before many imaginary audiences, just as 
Grandfather Smallweed throws a pillow at Mrs. Small- 
weed whenever he looks at her, and as Mr. Bounderby 
never appears upon the scene without traducing the 
devoted mother whom he has miserably pensioned 
off. Had the hint been given to Boz to illustrate the 
mental attitude of Caleb Garth by punctuating his 
talk with Scriptural diction, the temptation would have 
been irresistible, and that worthy man could not have 
opened his mouth without recalling to our memories 
the prophets of olden time. Once is sufficient to 
George Eliot, and it is done with so sure a hand that 
it is sufficient for us also. 

" Pooh ! where 's the use of asking for such fellows' 
reasons? The soul of man," said Caleb,with the deep tone 
and grave shake of the head which always came when he 
used this phrase — " the soul of man, when it gets fairly 
rotten, will bear you all sorts of poisonous toadstools, and 
no eye can see whence came the seeds thereof." It was 
one of Caleb's quaintnesses, that in his difficulty of finding 
speech for his thought, he caught, as it were, snatches of 
diction which he associated with various points of view or 
states of mind ; and whenever he had a feeling of awe, he 
was haunted by a sense of biblical phraseology, though he 
could hardly have given a strict quotation. 

Mary Garth is always hiding her emotion back of 
her humor, and her humor never takes the same form 



Her Sympathy 3 1 1 

twice. Brooke is a high comedy portrayal of rare 
quality, — a character distinct from all others, mi- 
nutely faithful in details and not in the least exag- 
gerated. The comic element does not reside in a 
constant repetition of the same words, but in his 
uniform manner of repeating various words. Con- 
trast — 

" Quite right, Ladislaw ; we shall make a new thing of 
opinion here," said Mr. Brooke. " Only, I want to keep 
myself independent about Reform, you know : I don't want 
to go too far. I want to take up Wilberforce's and Romilly's 
line, you know, and work at Negro Emancipation, Criminal 
Law — that kind of thing. But of course I should support 
Grey." 

" If you go in for the principle of Reform, you must be 
prepared to take what the situation offers," said Will. " If 
everybody pulled from his own bit against everybody else, 
the whole question would go to tatters." 

" Yes, yes, I agree with you — I quite take that point of 
view. I should put it in that light. I should support Grey, 
you know. But I don't want to change the balance of the 
constitution, and I don't think Grey would." 

" But that is what the country wants," said Will. " Else 
there would be no meaning in political unions or any other 
movement that knows what it 's about. It wants to have a 
House of Commons which is not weighted with nominees 
of the landed class, but with representatives of the other 
interests. And as to contending for a reform short of that, 
it is like asking for a bit of an avalanche which has already 
begun to thunder." 

*' That is fine, Ladislaw : that is the way to put it. Write 
that down, now. We must begin to get documents about 
the feeling of the country, as well as the machine-breaking 
and the general distress." 



3 1 2 George Eliot 

" As to documents," said Will, " a two-inch card will 
hold plenty. A few rows of figures are enough to deduce 
misery from, and a few more will show the rate at which the 
political determination of the people is growing." 

" Good : draw that out a little more at length, Ladislaw. 
That is an idea, now : write it out in the Pioneer. Put the 
figures and deduce the misery, you know ; and put the 
other figures and deduce — and so on. You have a way 
of putting things, Burke, now — when I think of Burke, I 
can't help wishing somebody had a pocket-borough to give 
you, Ladislaw. You 'd never get elected, you know. And 
we shall always want talent in the House : reform as we 
will, we shall always want talent. That avalanche and the 
thunder, now, was really a little like Burke. I want that 
sort of thing — not ideas, you know, but a way of putting 
them." 

with his speech from the balcony of the White Hart : 

" I am a close neighbor of yours, my good friends — 
you 've known me on the bench a good while — I 've always 
gone a good deal into public questions — machinery, now, 
and machine-breaking — you're many of you concerned 
with machinery, and I 've been going into that lately. It 
won't do, you know, breaking machines : everything must 
go on — trade, manufactures, commerce, interchange of 
staples — that kind of thing — since Adam Smith, that must 
go on. We must look all over the globe : — ' Observation 
with extensive view,' must look everywhere, — ' from China 
to Peru,' as somebody says — Johnson, I think, The ' Ramb- 
ler,' you know. That is what I have done up to a certain 
point — not as far as Peru ; but I 've not always staid at 
home — I saw it would n't do. I 've been in the Levant, 
where some of your Middleraarch goods go — and then 
again in the Baltic. The Baltic, now." 



Her Sympathy 313 

The author of Pickwick found himself, too soon in 
his career, in the unfortunate condition of all success- 
ful humorists, in that, in meeting from an unreason- 
able public a demand far beyond the possibility of 
even excellence in the supply, he was forced into the 
position of a professional fun-maker, — a sort of liter- 
ary Barnum. And while it is not disparaging to 
Dickens to say that he does not belong to the same 
class with George Eliot, any more than it is dispar- 
aging to Hogarth to say that he does not belong to 
the same class with Van Dyck, it is nevertheless true 
that the best humorists are not the professional ones. 
Strange as it may seem, a humorist ought to be a grave 
person. Not only is a little nonsense now and then 
relished by the gravest men, but the relish gets its 
grace from the gravity. Humor is an appreciation of 
incongruities, and this involves wisdom, — a quality 
sadly lacking in most of our comic writers. 



IX 

Every writer of strength has attempted to represent 
the feeling of sympathy between the nature outside 
of us and the nature within us, — that "pathetic 
fallacy" by which we read nature in the tones of the 
mind. If you visit the sea-shore heavy-hearted with 
grief, the ocean has its andante movements for you ; 
if in joy, its allegro : yet it is the same ocean. The 
dreary monotony of Dorothea's existence is thus shad- 
owed forth to her by the outlook from her boudoir: 

Mr. and Mrs. Casaubon, returning from their wedding 
journey, arrived at Lowick Manor in the middle of January. 
A light snow was falling as they descended at the door, and 



314 George Eliot 

in the morning, when Dorothea passed from her dressing- 
room into the blue-green boudoir that we know of, slie saw 
the long avenue of limes lifting their trunks from a white 
earth, and spreading white branches against the dun and 
motionless sky. The distant flat shrank in uniform white- 
ness and low-hanging uniformity of cloud. The very furni- 
ture in the room seemed to have shrunk since she saw it 
before : the stag in the tapestry looked more like a ghost 
in his ghostly blue-green world ; the volumes of poUte litera- 
ture in the book-case looked more like immovable imitations 
of books. 

But, as if fearing that we might place too much 
stress upon this personal construction of nature, we 
are particularly warned in another place that the 
great mother is impersonal, too, and that its objec- 
tivity is not to be charged at will by man's subjectivity : 

The eighteenth of August was one of those days when 
the sunshine looked brighter in all eyes for the gloom that 
went before. . . . And yet a day on which a blighting sorrow 
may fall upon a man. For if it be true that Nature at cer- 
tain moments seems charged with a presentiment of one 
individual lot, must it not also be true that she seems 
unmindful, unconscious of another? . . . There are so 
many of us, and our lots are so different : what wonder that 
Nature's mood is often in harsh contrast with the great crises 
of our lives? 

Because of her predominant humor (which is an- 
other way of saying, because of her predominant 
sympathy) George Eliot is an ironist rather than a 
satirist. A mind capable of vast indignation, yet 
checked by culture, is apt to find its outlet in that 
tempered form of sarcasm to which we have given 



Her Sympathy 3 1 5 

the name of irony: the scorn compounds with the 
humor; the sense of the ridiculous weds the sense of 
What is Right. 

These narrow notions about debt, held by the old- 
fashioned Tullivers, may perhaps excite a smile on the 
faces of many readers in these days of wide commercial 
views and wide philosophy, according to which everything 
rights itself without any trouble of ours : the fact that my 
tradesman is out of pocket by me is to be looked at through 
the serene certainty that somebody else's tradesman is in 
pocket by somebody else ; and since there must be bad 
debts in the world, why, it is mere egoism not to like that 
we in particular should make them instead of our fellow- 
citizens. I am telling the history of very simple people, 
who had never had any illuminating doubts as to personal 
integrity and honor. 

She is a master of ridicule, but, save in rare 
instances, an avoider of derision. Hers is not the 
" indignatio sseva" of Swift. There is only good 
nature in her imitation of the Wolffian school of 
critics: 

As to the origin of this song, whether it came in its 
actual state from the brain of a single rhapsodist, or was 
gradually perfected by a school or succession of rhapso- 
dists, I am ignorant. There is a stamp of unity, of 
individual genius, upon it, which inclines me to the former 
hypothesis, though I am not blind to the consideration 
that this unity may rather have arisen from that consensus 
of many minds which was a condition of primitive thought, 
foreign to our modern consciousness. Some will perhaps 
think that they detect in the first quatrain an indication of 
a lost line, which later rhapsodists, failing in imaginative 
vigor, have supplied by the feeble device of iteration : 



3 1 6 George Eliot 

others, however, may rather maintain that this very itera- 
tion is an original fehcity, to which none but the most 
prosaic minds can be insensible. 

In this connection, it is amusing to watch the 
flight of her Parthian arrow at those who claimed for 
that remarkable personage, Mr. Liggins, the author- 
ship of ' Adam Bede' : 

He . . . produced a work on the * Cultivation of Green 
Crops and the Economy of Cattle Feeding * which won 
him high congratulations at agricultural meetings ; but in 
Middlemarch admiration was more reserved : most per- 
sons there were inclined to believe that the merit of Fred's 
authorship was due to his wife, since they had never 
expected Fred Vincy to write on turnips and mangel- 
wurzel. 

But when Mary wrote a little book for her boys, called 
'Stories of Great Men, taken from Plutarch,' and had it 
printed and published by Grip & Co., Middlemarch, every 
one in the town was willing to give the credit of this work 
to Fred, observing that he had been to the University, 
"where the ancients were studied," and might have been a 
clergyman if he had chosen. 

In this way it was made clear that Middlemarch had 
never been deceived, and that there was no need to praise 
anybody for writing a book, since it was always done by 
somebody else. 

A sense of humor is, after all, the principal form 
of common-sense. Moreover, it is the saving sense 
which distinguishes common from vulgar sense, and 
is as remarkable for what it hinders as for what it 
does. Among other things, it prevents an author 
from sprinkling his pages with villains. " Plotting 



Her Sympathy 317 

covetousness," says George Eliot, " and deliberate 
contrivance, in order to accomplish a selfish end, 
are nowhere abundant but in the world of the drama- 
tist : they demand too intense a mental action for many 
of our fellow-parishioners to be guilty of them." 
There are, strictly speaking, no villains among her 
leading characters. Tito does not set out to be one ; 
his is not a predetermined villainy; it comes late, 
and is not so much the result of acute maliciousness 
as it is of complexities brought about in large part 
by love of ease and softness of temper. He does 
not wish harm to others ; he wishes good to himself 
so steadfastly that, in the exclusiveness of this passion, 
the harm to others follows. It all depends on the 
sense of obligation, — an all-essential sense which 
Tito neglects, not because of active malice, but of 
irksomeness under the burden which the obligation 
lays upon his pleasure-loving nature. He is driven 
into malice only by the circumstances of his deceit; 
which is quite different from the lago point of action. 
Raffles and Lapidoth are more dead-beats than 
villains. Dunstan Cass is lost sight of early in the 
story, and Dolfo Spini is too stupid in his wickedness 
to merit the title. The primal fire of Grandcourt's 
villainy is burnt out when the story opens, and the 
base plotters in ' Romola,' are, like the disagreeable 
clergymen, kept in the background. 



X 

The novel is the youngest of the arts of writing, 
and its superlative force lies in its inclusion of the 
older ones. It is able to present what is essential in 



3 1 8 George Eliot 

Bacon and Kant to myriads who never read philos- 
ophy in the abstract. Its form permits it to grasp 
subtle aspects of living truths which even a twentieth- 
century Shakspere could not enforce in drama. Its 
clothing of prose allows an extension of delineation 
not possible in any readable style of verse. Think, 
then, of the power of the novelist learned in philos- 
ophy, with the dramatic instinct, and possessing all 
the weapons of a prose armory. Raise that thought 
to the conception of the use of such a power in be- 
half of all suffering men and women, and George 
Eliot stands revealed as its realization. Cervantes, 
Scott, Fielding, even such lesser lights as Goldsmith 
and Le Sage, are placed before her ; but unless we 
hold our vision at the range of manners, and prefer 
to consider the playful buoyancy of imagination 
superior to its spiritual depth, we must exalt 
George Eliot, with all her faults, to a position not 
yet reached by any other. 

Hers was an ardent age, — the age of a new birth 
in science, with wide-spreading results in art; the 
age of ' Modern Painters,' and ' Sartor Resartus,' and 
of a Tennyson rebellious against all commonplace 
acceptances. She knew Fielding's place, just as she 
knew Dickens's, and was glad to take a holiday with 
him as she might. 

A great historian, as he insisted on calling himself, who 
had the happiness to be dead a hundred and twenty years 
ago, . . . glories in his copious remarks and digressions 
as the least imitable part of his work, and especially in 
those inidal chapters . . . where he seems to bring his 
arm-chair to the proscenium and chat with us in all the 
lusty ease of his fine English. But Fielding lived when the 



Her Sympathy 319 

days were longer (for time, like money, is measured by 
our needs), when summer afternoons were spacious, and 
the clock ticked slowly in the winter evenings. 



Surely all other leisure is hurry compared with a sunny 
walk through fields from " afternoon church," as such walks 
used to be in those old leisurely times, when the boat, 
gliding sleepily along the canal, was the newest locomotive 
wonder; when Sunday books had most of them old brown 
leather covers, and opened with remarkable precision 
always in one place. Leisure is gone — gone where the 
spinning-wheels are gone, and the pack-horses, and the 
slow wagons, and the peddlers who brought bargains to 
the door on sunny afternoons. Ingenious philosophers tell 
you, perhaps, that the great work of the steam-engine is to 
create leisure for mankind. Do not believe them ; it only 
creates a vacuum for eager thought to rush in. Even idle- 
ness is eager now — eager for amusement ; prone to excur- 
sion trains, art museums, periodical literature, and exciting 
novels; prone even to scientific theorizing, and cursory 
peeps through microscopes. Old Leisure was quite a dif- 
ferent personage; he read only one newspaper, innocent 
of leaders, and was free from that periodicity of sensations 
which we call post-time. He was a contemplative, rather 
stout gentleman, of excellent digestion, of quiet per- 
ceptions, undiseased by hypothesis ; happy in his inability 
to know the causes of things, preferring the things them- 
selves. He lived chiefly in the country, among pleasant 
seats and homesteads, and was fond of sauntering by the 
fruit-tree wall, and scenting the apricots when they were 
warmed by the morning sunshine, or of sheltering himself 
under the orchard boughs at noon, when the summer pears 
were falling. He knew nothing of week-day services, and 
thought none the worse of the Sunday sermon if it allowed 
him to sleep from the text to the blessing — liking the after- 



320 George Eliot 

noon service best, because the prayers were the shortest 
and not ashamed to say so ; for he had an easy, jolly con- 
science, broad-backed like himself, and able to carry a 
great deal of beer or port wine — not being made squeam- 
ish by doubts and qualms and lofty aspirations. Life was 
not a task to him, but a sinecure ; he fingered the guineas 
in his pocket, and ate his dinners, and slept the sleep of 
the irresponsible ; for had he not kept up his charter by 
going to church on the Sunday afternoon? 

Fine old Leisure ! Do not be severe upon him, and 
judge him by our modern standard ; he never went to 
Exeter Hall, or heard a popular preacher, or read ' Tracts 
for the Times,' or ' Sartor Resartus.' 



Of course one feels the strain in such an atmosphere, 
and it is for relief that critics fall back on the " fine old 
leisure " of the previous age. 

Fielding, as a character, was not a new force in 
literature, although the nature of his work was de- 
liciously so. He belongs to the Samuel Johnson 
type of man, — blunt, honest, prejudiced, rough in 
judgment, but tender of heart ; and he is followed, at a 
a more or less respectful distance, by the Levers, the 
Lovers, and the Marryats. He is, next to Cervantes, 
the most complete of the comic Homers. His wide 
sympathies are reckoned among the proofs of his 
greatness, but can they be seriously compared with 
the minute conscientiousness of George Eliot's? Are 
they not merely a boisterous goodfellowship, a bluff 
heartiness of liking for downright English traits of 
outspokenness, which carries with it a corresponding 
hatred for the opposites? The fine qualities of Tom 
Jones are emphasized by the contrasting mean quali- 
ties of Bilfil, — by the qualities of a hypocritical sneak 



Her Sympathy 321 

and coward. All the sympathy is for the major, there 
is none for the minor, figure. But we know how 
George Eliot treats hypocrisy in Bulstrode, and how 
her contrasting color is not wholly black because 
what it is contrasted with is not wholly white. It seems 
to me that her method is the more subtly humorous 
as well as the more deeply sympathetic ; the humor 
getting its flavor from the sympathy. 

Those others were, first, story-tellers, then delinea- 
tors of character. They had great art and much sym- 
pathy; and the enjoyment they gave was hearty, 
direct, and simple. Judged by the standards them- 
selves set, before George Eliot's day, George Eliot's 
work fails ; but as combining poetical insight, religious 
feeling, philosophical breadth, humorous portrayal, 
and a deep loving sympathy, that work stands apart, 
not only by reason of its positive qualities, but as 
pointing the way to all future art of the highest worth 
— the art which has to do with the most abundant 
life. 

She has invention. Some of her plots are quite com- 
plicated. But she was the first to illustrate the over- 
whelming importance of the relationship of the men 
and women of a story to the natural history of all 
men and women — her world the microcosm, the world 
outside the macrocosm. This was science ; it was the 
correlation of forces ; it was Comtism, if you please; 
but it was life. The mere device of plot is mere 
cleverness, compared with the power to develop the 
embryonic principles of life in the blessed sunlight of 
eternal law. It is not as if she placed the natural 
history of mankind on a plane superior to and apart 
from the history of her hero and heroine : violently 
would that have divorced her philosophy from her 

21 



322 George Eliot 

art, and translated her from a George Eliot, to be 
known forevermore as the creator of ' Adam Bede ' 
and ' Silas Marner,' back to the obscure essayist of 
the Westminster Review. She probed — as no one 
before her did — far deeper than that. She showed 
that romance, so far from dying in the new light, 
took on deeper colors ; that the inter-relationship of 
cause and effect, desire and will, the I and the Other 
than I, not only afforded scientific phenomena, but by 
the grasp it had on the human heart and conscience, 
was composed of the very passionate inmost soul of 
poetry, — of the stuff of its creation and the breath of 
its life. She did not reduce romance to a science; 
nor was it her mission to illustrate the romance of 
science. The mystery of life is not explained in her 
works. There is no Be-All and End-All system 
dreamt of in her philosophy. But her greatness is 
that she subordinates the finite parts to the infinite 
whole ; and her music, though cradled in pain, is a 
true music of the spheres. 



JANE AUSTEN 
«ri/£ EXQUISITE TOUCH" 



JANE AUSTEN 

''THE EXQUISITE TOUCH' 
A. — HER PLACE 



It is not, and yet again it is, because the three 
authors whose names adorn these pages happen to 
have been women that they are the subjects of our 
thought. This is not an attempt to add another 
volume to the large Hbrary of female appreciations. 
These names would the rather stand as a protest 
against that peculiar frivolity of criticising a woman's 
work in the light of her gender. But beyond this 
lies a fundamental truth, which prompts the general 
recognition of congenital dififerences in sex, which 
manifest themselves in the colors or forms of the work 
accomplished. The sexes are spiritually as well as 
physically complementary. A good woman novelist 
must have something of a man in her, for she must 
have judgment and strength: a good male novelist 
must have something of a woman in him, for he must 
have sympathy, which tempers judgment and justifies 
strength. 

The wise critic, however, will not repeat the error of 
Lewes in dwelling on the dififerences so long that the 
more notable similarities are lost sight of: he will 
simply acknowledge the force of the differences when, 



326 Jane Austen 

as in the case of our present study, they are evident, 
and will not regard them in any fanciful way as divid- 
ing into permanent separate camps the intellectual 
conceptions of men and women. Each of these 
women is chosen because she stands a determinate 
quality in literature ; and the three are considered 
in one book, not because together they form an 
interesting study of the distinctly feminine nature of 
these qualities, but because each of the qualities is of 
supreme importance in itself: yet none of these would 
have filled her place had she not had the essen- 
tial characteristics of her sex ; hence it is, indirectly 
and yet fundamentally, because of the womanhood 
that the subjects attract our notice. Guizot confessed 
that he found French and German fiction too artificial 
for his taste, and commended the English novels as 
more natural, " particularly those written by women." 
And of Miss Austen he says, one must go back to 
the great Athenian age for a parallel.^ Scott, writing 
of the portraiture of actual society, thinks the women 
" do this better." 2 With men there is "too much 
attempt to put the reader exactly up to the thoughts 
and sentiments of the parties." Upon these dicta, — 
the grave historian and the splendid romancer, the 
austere thinker and the enthusiastic poet each em- 
phasizing the undeniable point — we fall back for our 

1 ' Lady Susan, the Watsons.' With a Memoir by the Nephew, 
J. E. Austen-Leigh. Boston : Little, Brown, & Co., 1S99, p. 293. 

2 ' Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott,' by J. G. Lockhart, Esq., 
Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1S78, p. 618. Sir Walter was 
always complimentary to the ladies. " Miss Lucy Aikin tells a pretty 
story," says Mrs. Ritchie, in her ' Book of Sibyls,' " of Scott meeting 
Mrs. Barbauld at dinner and telling her that it was to her he owed 
his poetic gift." He said that Miss Edgeworth's Irish tales gave him 
his hint for the Waverleys, and even praised Mrs. Charlotte Smith's 
now forgotten novels, including them in his ' British Novelists.' 



Her Place 327 

support in claiming that it is not as woman's work 
that we wish to regard Miss Austen's, Miss Bronte's, 
and George EHot's, even though much of that which 
makes the work notable is distinctively womanly. 



II 

Charlotte Bronte was a voice crying in the wilderness, 
— crying for pain, crying unrestrained. It was the first 
note of pure personality — pure in every sense — heard 
in our literature ; and it was the more startling be- 
cause it was a woman's voice, George Eliot felt this 
passionate emotion in a larger way. The sympathetic 
tendencies of her thought were gradually developed 
until the personality of emotion was absorbed into a 
generalized sympathy, and the passion passed into 
compassion. She thus became the first (if not in 
time, at least in power) of altruists in fiction, — the 
first to give the fullest expression to that throbbing 
sense of the painful pressure of universal life upon 
the individual conscience which is now felt by all 
upon whom her message has fallen. Miss Austen's 
right of admittance to this fellowship, bearing its 
own unassailable credentials, we hope to make plain 
in the present essay. 



Ill 

We shall perhaps the better understand both Miss 
Bronte and George Eliot by considering the other 
lady out of her chronological order, and it is not 
without purpose that this place has been reserved 
for her. If we were to yield to the voice of the 



328 Jarie Austen 

charmer — and so it always sounds when Mr. Birrell 
calls — this relegation would be for the same reason 
that the bishop is made to march at the end of the 
procession, namely, that the first shall be last ; for 
Mr. Birrell concludes his monograph on Charlotte 
Bronte thus : 

" It would hardly be safe to name Miss Austen, Miss 
Bronte, and George Eliot as the three greatest women 
novelists the United Kingdom can boast, and were one to 
go on and say that the alphabetical order of their names 
is also the order of merit, it would be necessary to seek 
police protection, and yet surely it is so. 

" The test of merit for a novel can be nothing else than 
the strength and probable endurance of its pleasure-giving 
capacity. ... To be read always, everywhere, and by all 
is the impossible ideal. Who fails least is the greatest 
novelist. A member of the craft may fairly enough pray in 
aid of his immortality, his learning, his philosophy, his width 
of range, his depth of passion, his height of feeling, his 
humor, his style, or any mortal thing he can think of; but 
unless his novels give pleasure and are likely to go on giv- 
ing pleasure, his grave is dug, and sooner or later, probably 
sooner, will be occupied by another dead novelist. 

" Applying this test, we ask — what pleasure-giving ele- 
ments do Miss Austen's novels now possess which they will 
not possess a century hence? None ! If they please now, 
they will please then, unless in the meantime some catastro- 
phe occurs to human nature, which shall rob the poor thing 
of the satisfaction she has always hitherto found in contem- 
plating her own visage. Faiths, fashions, thrones, parlia- 
ments, late dinners, may all fade away : we may go forward, 
we may go back ; recall political economy from Saturn, or 
Mr. Henry George from New York : crown Mr. Parnell 
King of Ireland, or hang him high as Haman : but fat Mary 



Her Place 329 

Bennet, the elder {sic') Miss Bates, Mr. Rushworth, and 
Mr. John Thorpe must always remain within call, being not 
accidental, but essential figures." ^ 

But if the reasons brought forward in the foregoing 
studies for the supremacy of Miss Austen's successors 
are valid, this preference of Mr. Birrell's will be re- 
garded merely as a preference — which is quite apart 
from a critical estimate ; and we shall find other than 
ritual reasons for putting Miss Austen last. 

This present is, indeed, the " strenuous life." The 
personal yet noble cry of Charlotte Bronte, and the 

. . . pulses stirred to generosity 
In deeds of daring rectitude 

of George Eliot are living forces to-day, which, be- 
cause of the later disturbances, does not feel the calm 
air of Miss Austen's time. Miss Austen had to do 
with manners ; we have advanced to methods. She 
was content with picturing the life she saw; we 
search for the philosophy which will explain it. Her 
view was from the level of her own age ; ours from 
that of all the ages. Yet the very laxity of her day 
was in part the reason for the energy of this, and we 
cannot hope to even approach a comprehension of 
the full purpose of the last half of the nineteenth 
century until we have considered the apparent lack 
of purpose of the last half of the eighteenth. We 
have reserved Miss Austen, then, that in studying her 
works, with the more modern " notes " of her suc- 
cessors still ringing in our ears, we may more clearly 
understand the great differences between that time 

1 ' Life of Charlotte Bronte/ by Augustine Birrell. London : 
Walter Scott, 1887, pp. 175-176. 



3 30 J^ne Austen 

and this and find therein their partial explanation. 
And as Miss Austen's name is associated with the 
lighter things of life, may not the consideration of 
her in this place be offered as a dessert after the more 
solid courses which have preceded? 



IV 

Just as Charlotte Bronte's and George Eliot's were 
new voices in literature, so also was Jane Austen's. 
The earlier novelists were the successors of the Essay- 
ists. Now, the Essayists were, first and last, moral- 
ists. They meant to rebuke the vices of an age 
become hideously corrupt through the subjection of 
those whose office is, by its nature and by the terms 
of its commission, to rebuke vice, to the class which 
could thus feed unchecked on what went unrebuked. 
The social position of the lower clergy in the first 
half of the eighteenth century was somewhat below 
that of the upper servants in a great man's house.^ 
Forced to consort with the basest elements of society, 
they, who should have been the champions of moral 
liv^ing, were no better than their companions. As for 
their superiors in the Church, they were either them- 
selves a part of the aristocratic class and submerged 
in its coarse depravities, or were so closely attached 
to it as not to be able to influence it from any van- 
tage point of morality; and were, when not them- 

^ The innocence of Abraham Adams, Fielding says, was not so 
remarkable " in a country parson " as it would have been " in a 
gentleman who had passed his life behind the scenes ; " thus recog- 
nizing the clear distinction of that time between the class to which 
even a learned parson like Adams belonged and the class of " gentle- 
man." 



Her Place 33 i 

selves actively vicious, at least negatively so in their 
cold and ineffectual worldliness. Every reader of the 
Spectator will remember Addison's picture of the 
country parson of that time at his best, — Sir Roger 
de Coverley's domestic chaplain : 

" My chief Companion, when Sir Roger is diverting him- 
self in the Woods or the Fields, is a very venerable Man who 
is ever with Sir Roger, and has lived at his House in the 
Nature of a Chaplain above thirty years. This Gentleman 
is a Person of good Sense and some Learning, of a very 
regular Life and obliging Conversation. He heartily loves 
Sir Roger, and knows that he is very much in the old 
Knight's Esteem, so that he lives in the Family rather as a 
Relation than a Dependant. ... As I was walking with 
him last Night, he asked me how I liked the good Man, 
whom I have just now mentioned ? and without staying for 
my Answer told me. That he was afraid of being insulted 
with Latin and Greek at his own Table ; for which reason 
he desired a particular Friend of his at the University to 
find him out a Clergyman rather of plain Sense than much 
Learning, of a good Aspect, a clear Voice, a sociable 
Temper, and, if possible, a Man that understood a little 
of Backgammon. ... At his first settling with me, I made 
him a Present of all the good Sermons which have been 
printed in English, and only begg'd of him that every Sun- 
day he would pronounce one of them in the Pulpit. Ac- 
cordingly, he has digested them into such a Series, that 
they follow one another naturally, and make a continued 
System of practical Divinity. 

" As Sir Roger was going on in his Story, the Gentleman 
we were talking of came up to us ; and upon the Knight's 
asking him who preached to-morrow, told us the Bishop of 
St. Asaph in the Morning, and Dr. South in the Afternoon. 
He then showed us his List of Preachers for the whole 



332 Jane Austen 

Year, where I saw with a great deal of Pleasure, Archbishop 
Tillotson, Bishop Sajinderson, Doctor Barrow, Doctor 
Calamy, with Several living Authors who have published dis- 
courses of Practical Divinity. ... A Sermon repeated 
after this Manner, is like the Composition of a Poet in the 
mouth of a graceful Actor. 

" I could heartily wish that more of our country Clergy 
would follow this Example; and instead of wasting their 
Spirits in laborious Compositions of their own, would en- 
deavor after a handsome Elocution, and all those other 
Talents that are proper to enforce what has been penned 
by greater Masters. This would not only be more easy to 
themselves, but more edifying to the People." 

For this same parson at his worst, we have only to 
refer to the novelists who succeeded Addison, whose 
Trullibers and Thwackums and Jack Quicksets, and 
the knavish curate who figures in Chapter IX. of 
' Roderick Random,' ^ and the clerical gentlemen we 
are invited to look upon at the Visitation dinner in 
Letter LVIII. of the 'Citizen of the World,' and 
such " ministers" as the splay-footed, tobacco-stained 
priest called upon to read the marriage service over 
Harriet Byron, and the " buck parson " who, in 
' Belinda,' first taught my Lord Delacour to drink, 
are, one would say after reading Bishop Burnett's un- 
prejudiced testimony, not exaggerated delineations. 

1 This " young fellow in a rusty gown and cassock," with an ex- 
ciseman for a partner, is soon perceived to be a sharper at cards, 
stripping the opponents " of all their cash in a very short time." " I 
did not at all wonder," says Roderick, " to find a cheat in canonicals, 
this being a character frequent in my own country; but I was scan- 
dalized at the indecency of his behavior and the bawdy songs which he 
sung." The whole chapter, introducing as it does, one of the upper 
clergy (" this rosy son of the Church ") is a striking commentary on 
the times. 



Her Place 333 

This corruption, permeating society, deadened all 
spiritual life, and fastened upon the eighteenth cen- 
tury the low-water mark of materialism. Vice among 
the robust Northern races, taking on its coarser forms, 
becomes a sin against taste, as well as a transgression 
against morals, and on this score the urbane Addison 
attacked it in his Essays. The vulgarity, the rowdy- 
ism, these scandalous indecorums, and the graceless 
foppery of all this profligacy, he set himself against; 
and it is a clear indication of the unspiritual atmos- 
phere of the time that its chief moralist should, in 
his metrical criticism of the poets, never rise beyond 
the standpoint of taste. He who was beyond all else 
polished finds damning qualities in Chaucer because 
of his " ?^«polished strain ; " and this is the criticism 
in which he disparages Spenser and makes no men- 
tion at all of Shakspere. Addison was the high 
priest of Conventionalism, and was the true son of an 
age which could make " manners, good breeding, and 
the graces," of more consequence than honor and 
justice, in the calm language of Lord Chesterfield to 
his son. But the Spectator undoubtedly had a civil- 
izing influence, and deserves the reputation it enjoyed 
of " making morality fashionable." That it was a 
calculating morality, of the sort later exemplified in 
Benjamin Franklin, is due to the fact that with good 
taste and manners as the main lever, it was impossible 
to have lifted it beyond a practical level in a materi- 
alistic age. Addison measures the loftiest flights by 
a standard of imagination in \\'\\\c\\ form regulates all 
the by-laws. He thinks Sin and Death of too 
chimerical an existence to be proper actors in an 
Epic poem. Even his famous Hymn does not lift 
up, it simply pleases ; it addresses itself to our fancy 



334 ]^^^ Austen 

as a kind of poetical appendage to Butler's Analogy; 
and Haydn's tune, to which it is usually sung, con- 
nects it in our thought with Philip Wakem's criticism 
of that master's 'Creation,' — "sugared compla- 
cency and flattering make-believe, as if it were written 
for the birth-day fete of a German grand duke." In- 
deed, a Bolingbroke of his day might have said to its 
author what that satirical statesman later told White- 
field, on hearing him preach in Lady Huntingdon's 
drawing-room, — that " he had done great justice to 
the Divine attributes in his discourse," Although 
powerfully moved (moved but not overwhelmed, in 
Taine's phrase) by his greatest simile of the angel 
who " rides in the whirlwind and directs the storm," 
we can never quite dissociate the picture from that 
other picture of Thackeray's, representing this good 
angel flying off with Mr. Addison and landing him in 
the place of Commissioner of Appeals as his reward 
for writing the party poem which contained this 
valiant simile. 

An age whose finest product is Addison, and whose 
prose had more poetry in it than its poetry,^ must in 
the lower forms of its phenomena afford much ground 
for the moralist. This ground the Essayists occupied 
to good effect. And as in dealing with objectionable 
qualities, these qualities must be represented, a later 
reading of the reforming literature is liable to be dis- 
tasteful to those who live in an age in which the 
reforms are in operation. Miss Austen's outburst 

1 Even as late as Goldsmith, the poetry had not been divorced 
from the formalism. The ' Vicar ' has more poetic charm (in that 
it has more simple nature) than its author's most celebrated poem, 
which still represents the stiffness of the age by such lines as — 

But now the sounds of population fail; 
No cheerful murmurs fluctuate in the gale. 



Her Place 335 

against the Spectator in 'Northanger Abbey' has 
puzzled some who too exclusively associate the 
Essays with the urbanity of Addison, and whose 
regard for the delightful Sir Roger causes the less 
admirable portions to be overlooked. It will be 
remembered that Miss Austen is defending her trade 
in attacking the habit of novelists of " degrading . . . 
the very performances to the number of which they 
are themselves adding. . . . Alas ! if the heroine of 
one novel be not patronized by the heroine of another, 
from whom can she expect protection and regard?" 
If a young lady, she says, is detected reading a novel, 
she will affect indifference and momentary shame, 
but will be proud if caught with a volume of the 
Spectator in her hand, " though the chances must be 
against her being occupied with any part of that 
voluminous publication of which either the matter or 
manner would not disgust a young person of taste; 
the substance of its papers so often consisting in the 
statement of improbable circumstances, unnatural 
characters, and topics of conversation which no longer 
concern any one living ; and their language too fre- 
quently so coarse as to give us no very favorable 
idea of the age that could endure it." 

This is interesting, not only as emphasizing Miss 
Austen's personal taste, but also as pointing to the 
fact that the age " that could endure it " she at least 
thought was passed. Her strictures would seem to 
indicate that a new age had come in. Though a 
larger view might have been taken of the subject, 
Miss Austen was right in her charge that the Essay- 
ists were coarse. It is almost always a frivolous and 
very frequently a vulgar company we have to travel 
with through their pages, and the interest is literary 



336 J^riG Austen 

and historical, rather than living and spontaneous, in 
all those dissections of beaux' hearts and ritual direc- 
tions for the proper exercise of fans. But the same 
criticism might be applied to Juvenal, and Miss 
Austen would have enjoyed that author still less. 
That she did not inveigh against coarseness in Rich- 
ardson, who carried on the didactic purpose of the 
Essayists, is because she so gladly recognized in his 
great synthetic skill the same power that moved her 
to construct, that had Lamb's summing up been 
known to her, that " the keynote of the whole com- 
position is libertine pursuit," " the undivided pursuit 
of lawless gallantry," she would not have allowed the 
truthfulness of the complaint to have interfered with 
the enjoyment of the work. ' Pamela, or Virtue 
Rewarded,' — the sub-title shows the moral purpose. 
The novelist's aim in 'Clarissa' is elaborately set 
forth on the titlepage : " Clarissa : Or, The History 
of A Young Lady: comprehending The Most Im- 
portant Concerns of Private Life: And Particularly 
Shewing the Distresses That May Attend The Mis- 
conduct Both of Parents and Children, In Relation to 
Marriage." ^ 

The eighteenth century was an outspeaking age, 
and in the department of manners the change for the 
better was so gradual that it was not until its very 
close that it became remarkable, — a change for 
which, on its literary side, Miss Austen herself was 
mainly responsible. But the point is that a moralist 
in a coarse age, reflecting its predominating charac- 
teristics by having them as the subjects of his dis- 
cussion, must either weary the readers of future ages 
through constant repetitions of unattractive scenes 
1 See also the Preface and Postscript. 



Her Place 337 

(which is the fault of Richardson, and is what Miss 
Austen objects to in the Spectator), or must make 
the scenes themselves alluring, which was accom- 
plished by Fielding. Although I fancy that gentle- 
man had his tongue in his cheek when he wrote of 
' Tom Jones ' that it contained nothing which could 
" offend even the chastest eye," still, by the grace of 
satire, and by his enormous comic power in the de- 
lineation of human weaknesses, he is, with all his ani- 
mal coarseness weighing against the estimate, ranked 
properly with the moralists. The age did not con- 
sider him coarse. One young lady can write to an- 
other of ' Joseph Andrews ' that it has a "surprising 
variety of nature, wit, morality, and good sense," 
and that it is " peculiarly charming " because of its 
" spirit of benevolence." ^ 



y 

Miss Burney has been called the creator of the 
family novel. Using that faculty of observation on 
which all true realism must be built, and which is 
first noticeable in the pages of the Spectator, and is 
later developed to a high degree by Richardson and 
Fielding, she presents her public with a chastened 
set of characters, whose actions, for the first time in 
a chronological course through English fiction, may 
be read aloud without expurgations and without 

1 ' A Series of Letters between Mrs. Elizabeth Carter and Miss 
Catherine Talbot,' etc., London: Printed for F. C. and J. Rivington, 
1808, vol i., p. 16. This is the " Mrs. Carter" who was so celebrated 
for her extraordinary learning, the chief result of which was her trans- 
lation of Epictetus, — a learning, however, which did not exclude an 
almost equally notable piety. 

22 



338 Jane Austen 

blushes. 'Evelina' was published in 1778, some 
sixty years from the date of the Spectator, and thirty- 
six from ' Joseph Andrews,' and the question arises, 
is this change in tone due to a feminine delicacy, or 
is it the reflection of a real change in manners and 
morals? A chivalrous desire to associate the two 
ideas. Woman and Purity, in letters, is unhappily 
defeated by recollections of Mrs. Behn and Mrs. 
Haywood ; and a glance at the times will show that 
the habitual grossness of the century had not mate- 
rially improved. Miss Burney's comparative mild- 
ness probably owes its origin to a refinement which 
is to be found among women in all ages, notwith- 
standing these typical exceptions. 

We have touched on the coarse looseness of the 
early part of the century to denote the difficulties in 
the way of any subtler art in its closing years ; for 
this viciousness, growing by what it fed on, increased 
in the dead weight of its materialism until its utter 
lack of principle, its graceless infamy, its brutal hard- 
ness, its almost cannibal grossness, would make one 
cry out that religion was dead in England in the 
eighteenth century, did not one remember that re- 
ligion never dies, and that if it should die, it would 
not be religion. 

In 1786 there were nearly two hundred offences 
on the statute book punishable by death. Even to 
receive a stolen pocket-handkerchief might be made 
a capital offence. Pope's verse — 

And wretches hang that jurymen may dine — 

applied to the latter quarter of the century also ; for 
although suits in chancery were spun out over many 



Her Place 339 

years, in criminal cases — as if human life were less 
valuable than civil property — the trial was generally 
compressed into a single day. Women were still 
whipped publicly through the streets. In 1789 per- 
sons were burned at the stake for crimes for which we 
now give ten years' imprisonment, and school chil- 
dren were allowed holidays to see executions. For 
petty debts men languished in prison for life. The 
keystone of commercial existence was the African 
slave trade. As late as 1828, Lord Shaftesbury saw 
the insane in " mad houses " chained to straw beds and 
left from Saturday to Monday without the care of 
their keepers. It was not until 1771 that the law was 
repealed which condemned a prisoner who refused to 
plead on a capital charge to death by weights laid on 
the breast.^ 

An age so publicly careless of human life, so mon- 
strously perverted in the general principles of law and 
equity, must necessarily be an age of private social cor- 
ruption and ugly indelicacy. To the active vice of 
the early years of the century was now added the ac- 
cumulated grossness of the Hanoverians, mixed with 
the stupid limitation of wisdom to all things material. 
The novel of manners naturally reflected these char- 
acteristics, and it is to Miss Burney's credit that so 
much of them is handed down to us in a way that 
sufficiently denotes the age, without the unbridled 
license of her masculine predecessors. For the first 
time we see the possibilities and the attempts of prof- 

^ See Lecky's 'History of England in the Eighteenth Century,' 
vol. i., pp. 245 seq., and vol. vi., pp. 541 seq., and tlie authorities there 
quoted ; also Mr. Russell's chapter ' Social Ameliorations,' in his 
' Collections and Recollections; ' and biographies of Shaftesbury and 
Howard. . 

) 



340 Jane Austen 

ligacy rather than the high-noon picture of vice 
actually triumphant. She, too, is a moralist and has 
a distaste for the immoralities which she describes. 
But she shares with Richardson, and with all who fall 
short of the highest art, the failure to make that art so 
compellingly great that it will, on the one hand, not 
be pushed aside by its own creations (and be thus 
defeated by the means intended for its victory) and, 
on the other, not lend its own proper beauty to the en- 
hancing of what, without such aid, would appear to all 
healthy eyes as improper and hideous. We are not now 
concerned with this latter fault, as it marks too nearly 
that decadence of art which has always set in after 
some great golden age, signifying that initial stage of 
a decline, after a long life upon the heights, when 
art begins to be cultivated, not to make its subject 
beautiful, but to minister selfishly to itself. There 
were no heights in the days of our eighteenth-century 
realists ; and the best of them were beginning a 
new ascent, with many missteps and huge dif- 
ficulties to overcome, to an elevation under whose 
grateful shade we still take refuge in the poems of 
Wordsworth. 

Such was the age still extant when Jane Austen 
wrote, with a public taste to coax with her delicate 
flavors which had been fed for innumerable years on 
those rude meats which nourish the animal at the ex- 
pense of the spiritual in man, as well as that later 
fondness for highly spiced condiments first prepared 
in the 'Castle of Otranto.' Until we reach Miss 
Austen we do not meet with realism wholly devoid of 
offence (for Miss Burney's mildness is only compara- 
tive), and she is the first novelist who combines with 
this a living interest, which makes the smallness of her 



Her Place 341 

scale, forced on her by her omissions, a positive 
merit. 

Oil the point of taste alone — a word we shall have 
to make frequent use of in our consideration of Miss 
Austen — the superiority of ' Pride and Prejudice' and 
'Emma' to 'Evelina' and 'Cecilia' is everywhere 
manifest. The atrocious behavior of Captain Mirvan 
towards Madame Duval has no counterpart in the 
younger lady's fiction, who cannot allow Emma's mo- 
mentary ill-humored wit at the expense of Miss Bates 
to go unrebuked. There is nothing in the six books 
of Miss Austen like the adventure of Evelina with the 
creatures, male and female, of the Marylebone Gar- 
dens, that night of the fireworks. Only a trace of the 
swearing habit of the day may be found in our author. 
" Good God ! " with Miss Burney is as common as 
the " Mon Dieu ! " of a Frenchman, and even Lord 
Orville cannot announce breakfast withoutcalling upon 
divinity to witness; while, as an Irishman might put 
it, every time Miss Larolles opens her mouth a 
" Lord ! " pops out. Even Miss Edgeworth makes 
her women profane, or at least one of them, Mrs. 
Freke ; and as for her men, the language of Sir Philip 
Baddely might be used as a swearing dictionary. In 
regard to drinking, contrast the mild solitary instance 
of Mr. Elton with Miss Edgeworth's Lord Delacour, 
who could " drink more than any two-legged animal 
in his majesty's dominions." It would have been im- 
possible for Miss Austen to have described such a 
cruel scene as the two young rakes in 'Evelina' arrange 
for their jaded amusement in compelling two old 
women, over eighty years of age, to run a foot-race 
for a bet. Mrs. Goddard occasionally leaves her neat 
parlor to " win or lose a few sixpences by " Mr. Wood- 



342 J^ne Austen 

house's " fireside." That is all, — a mere touch. Per 
contra, in Miss Edgeworth's Mrs, Luttridge, we see 
the vice emphasized.^ 

So much for her restraint in picturing the grosser 
forms of the life of the times, which was partially due 
to her actual unacquaintance with them, and a con- 
scientious realism which deterred her from portraying 
what she did not experimentally know; but still more, 
to a native delicacy which shrank from all coarseness 
and vice. Because of their broader brushes, we gain 
from Miss Burney and Miss Edgeworth a wider view 
of the day than from Miss Austen, and the works of 
the latter would be incomplete without hints from the 
former; and yet, such is the nicety and the truthful- 
ness of her art, there is more verity in her limited 
portraiture than in the more comprehensive exhibits 
of the others. 

VI 

" There is no way," says Herbert Spencer, " of 
distinguishing those feelings which are natural from 

• How prevalent it was may be learned from Horace Walpole's 
letters. See in particular his letter to the Earl of Strafford, in 1786, 
vol. viii., p. 73 : " At the end of the century three titled ladies, Lady 
Buckinghamshire, Lady Archer, and Lady Mount-Edgcombe, were so 
notorious for their passion for play that they were popularly known 
as ' Faro's Daughters,' and Gilray published in 1796 a caricature rep- 
resenting two of them as standing in the pillory, with a crier and his 
bell in front. This was in consequence of what was said by Chief 
Justice Kenyon, in a case that came before him in 1796, when he said, 
with reference to the practice of gambling : ' If any prosecutions of 
this nature are fairly brought before me and the parties are justly 
convicted, whatever be their rank or station in the country, — though 
they should be the first ladies in the land — they shall certainly ex- 
hibit themselves in the pillory.'" — 'Novels and Novelists of the 
Eighteenth Century,' by William Forsythe. New York : D. Appleton 
& Co., 1871. 



Her Place 343 

those which are conventional, except by an appeal to 
first principles." And it might be added that an age 
which loses sight of first principles is unprincipled^ as 
well as unnatural. Hence the grossness of this age 
we are considering, which makes its formalism so 
peculiar. There are by Miss Austen's time the open- 
ing notes of new voices, aiming at these first principles. 
Cowper and Burns have come. It is real nature that 
we see once more in Cowper, who was the first to 
criticise Pope (in whom was gathered up the quintes- 
sence of the formal) on the ground that he — 

Made poetry a mere mechanic art. 

And every warbler has his tune by heart. 

Guided by the same standard of judgment as Addi- 
son, Pope thought Dryden the greatest because the 
smoothest of poets. Disguise it to our consciences 
by whatever literary chicanery we may invent, the 
fact is that Christianity has changed the standards of 
art by its infusion of ethics. Much of the talk about 
the separation of art and ethics is futile because the 
latter has so quietly and so insidiously charged the 
atmosphere of life that the art which is true to life 
cannot but partake of that atmosphere. An ethical 
emphasis, therefore, should not be regarded as a dif- 
ferentiation from, but as a representation of, art, other 
things being equal. Christianity has established a 
perfect reciprocity between nature and grace, between 
art and ethics. What is simply non-moral in Theoc- 
ritus, because simply natural, is, in his paraphraser 
Dryden, immoral, because of the altered atmosphere; 
and Pope's ever-straining aim at finish made him, 
although a realist, unreal; and, like his master, the 
pseudo-classicism of his work, mixed with a native 



^44 J^^^ Austen 

pruriency of thought, resulted in a body of indelicate 
imagery which will forever exclude it from the best 
poetry of the world. 

While Cowper breaks away from this formal stand- 
ard, we do not find in him, or in the poets before 
him, more than a simple feeling for nature. The 
deepest note he touches is the noble poem on his 
mother's picture, the receipt of which stirred a real 
affection to real poetry, which still moves us to real 
sympathy. " The meek intelligence of those dear 
eyes " looks at us as it did at him ; which is, I think, 
the best proof of the living quality of the emotion. 
To appreciate how Cowper had advanced on the 
mechanical conventionalisms of the day, compare 
this poem with one on a similar subject by his 
friend and biographer, Hayley. Poor Hayley's filial 
love was probably as deep as Cowper's, but we weep 
with the one and do not weep with the other. The 
adjective 's the thing. The ages of conventionalism 
are weak in adjectives, and Hayley can think of no 
better word to describe the ocean rolling under a 
vessel tossed by a fearful storm than " indignant." 
And yet we do not find in Cowper the passionate 
love for, the high communings with, Nature which 
come later. We have in Cowper and Crabbe, in 
Thomson and Gray, a series of objective moralizing 
pictures, pleasingly new and pure, with a comment 
running along with the sentiment, and in the de- 
gree in which it is unduly emphasized, interfering 
with the completeness of the charm. Cowper's ideal 
of bliss was an evening at Olney, with Mrs. Unwin and 
Lady Austen purring about the tea-kettle. 

Fireside enjoyments, homeborn happiness. 
And all the comforts that the lowly roof 



Her Place 34r 

Of undisturbed retirement, and the hours 
Of long uninterrupted evening knows. 

This is also the Vicar's thought: '* What thanks do 
we not owe to heaven for thus bestowing tranquillity, 
health, and competence ! I think myself happier now 
than the greatest monarch upon earth. He has no 
such fireside, nor such pleasant faces about it." 
When the storm arises outside, there is no fierce 
Brontean joy in its demoniac fury. Mrs. Unwin pours 
another cup of tea, and Lady Austen suggests a new 
canto to the * Task,' in which the wild bluster of the 
outdoor night shall be contrasted pleasantly with the 
cozy indoor comfort of blazing logs and blissful com- 
panionship. Nor has the day of "eager thought" 
yet come in its fulness — 

" Leisure is gone — gone where the spinning-wheels are 
gone, and the pack-horses, and the slow wagons, and the 
peddlers who brought bargains to the door on sunny after- 
noons. Ingenious philosophers tell you, perhaps, that the 
great work of the steam engine is to create leisure for man- 
kind. Do not believe them ; it only creates a vacuum for 
eager thought to rush in. . . . Old Leisure . . . was a 
contemplative, rather stout gentleman, of excellent digestion, 
of quiet perceptions, undiseased by hypothesis : happy in 
his inability to know the causes of things, preferring the things 
themselves." 

or Goldsmith would disturb the peaceful reflections 
of his good Vicar with a few troublesome thoughts 
about the social conditions beyond his fireside. The 
poor were being observed, but objectively. Their 
miseries were noted by Crabbe, but there was no plan 
of social helpfulness in his design, and no philosoph- 



346 J^^^ Austen 

ical or ethical reach in his poetry,^ No better idea 
of the complete change of attitude in this respect can 
be gained than by contrasting Crabbe's " hoary swain " 
with Mr. Markham's ' Man with the Hoe.' The pas- 
sion for humanity had not yet developed; but it was 
something to have the facts recognized which in due 
time awakened the enthusiasm. So, although the 
Rev. Mr. Crabbe did not care so very much for the 
poor of the two livings he so rarely visited, he is suf- 
ficiently sorry for their wretchedness to observe them 
from a distance, and to make reflections. This " ex- 
ercise of the internal sense" is to bear fruit in time. 
Reflection comes after observation, and observation 
had only lately had its new birth. The search for 
causes, the eff"ort to substitute a good new for a bad 
old, the probing of evil prompted by a loving hope 
in the high possibilities of all mankind, — this had 
not yet begun. 

The democratic song of Burns had little or no im- 
mediate influence on the society which we are consid- 
ering: it was only the milder feeling of Cowper and 
Crabbe, of Thomson and Gray, of Goldsmith and 
Young, which reflected the premonitions of the dawn 
which came with Wordsworth. It was still the orna- 
mental age, still an age lacking the highest forms of 
imagination, still content with fancy. And further, 
apart from its choicest springs, it was still the down- 
right age, and, in a way, a hopeless age, for Satire is 
frequently the last stage of hopelessness. A lack of im- 

1 It is only just to note, however, that the essay on prisons which 
Goldsmith puts in the mouth of his unhappy Vicar is in full accord 
with the enlightened views of modern reformers, and that in his 
prose preface to ' The Borough,' Crabbe condemns what has since 
been legislated out of existence in our best alms-houses, — the 
promiscuous herding of the sexes in such places. 



Her Place 347 

agination precluded optimism, and without optimism 
there can be no reform. The depths of coarseness 
which are sounded in Smollett's works, for example, — 
are they not merely echoing notes of hoarse, pitiless 
voices around him ? Is he not simply Crabbe extended 
into prose, his coarser nature less gently moved, a 
Hogarth in fiction, who, feeling the meanness, perpetu- 
ates it for a warning; and, stopping at realism, not 
endowed with power to draw the opposing virtues, 
presents too unrelieved a picture of the vice ? Here is 
the moralist again, not differing in character, only 
differing in manner, from the Essayists. 

VII 

We can best approach the positive study of Miss 
Austen by a little further comparison with the elder 
lady. And here again, let me say, it is not primarily 
because the two are of one sex that I thus group 
them, but because Miss Austen is pre-eminently the 
novelist of manners, and the manners of the age had, 
between herself and Fielding, been most typically 
described by Miss Burney. 

First, in their attitude towards the " lower classes." 
Miss Austen has been called narrow because she 
limited her view to her own class. But when the 
sympathies are not sufficiently extended to gather 
into their scope objects which, away from those sym- 
pathies, have no interest, and are perhaps antagonistic, 
it is the part of wisdom and good taste to leave them 
alone. Jane Austen's omissions were not due to a 
wilful disobedience to some heavenly vision; they 
were nothing more than the absence of fruit because 
no seed had been sown. It was simply a denial of 



348 J^riG Austen 

nature ; and to be true to such a denial is as fine an 
art as is the opposite art which compels its votaries 
to be true to it. We have only to recall Miss Bur- 
ney's Branghtons and her Mr. Smith to become 
grateful to Miss Austen for Jier "narrowness," and to 
appreciate the difference between that and the sort 
which throws contempt upon what does not belong 
to itself. Better even contemptuous silence than 
contemptuous speech. With all her superiority to 
her great predecessors in the matter of refinement, 
Miss Burney shares in the weakness of her age — 
which is the weakness of all brutal ages — in holding 
up for purposes of ridicule manners and customs 
below the level of her own. Her plan is to make 
them contemptible, which is the very word her good 
clergyman, Mr, Villars, uses concerning them. It 
was the age of the whipping-post and the stocks, and 
this is their reflection in literature. There are three 
ways of treating a class whose habits and tastes are 
different from those of the readers the author has 
in mind : not to treat it at all, which was Miss 
Austen's method ; or to accentuate the vulgarities, 
and thus widen the difference between it and other 
classes by the addition of disgust to the sum of the 
comic effect, and this was Miss Burney's way; or to 
let sympathetic take the place of supercilious laugh- 
ter, — to laugh with, instead of at, the children of 
one's fancy, and thus to bear a more human relation 
to them, — more that of a father, less that of a step- 
father. " Put yourself in his place " is a form of 
noblesse oblige which had not yet made itself manifest 
in fiction, — the sensibility to appreciate the values of 
standpoints other than one's own, and from those 
standpoints to humorously criticise one's own. It 



Her Place 349 

was reserved for Dickens to first draw the life of the 
"lower classes" with both sympathy and humor; 
and there is nothing in the later nineteenth-century 
attitude of art towards those classes which would not 
add to the lessening of the gap of a proper mutual 
understanding between master and servant, the em- 
ployer and the employed, the sons of leisure and the 
sons of toil. But if Miss Austen does not reach be- 
yond her times after this sympathy, she at least rises 
above them in abstaining from a ridicule which, con- 
sidering its origin, is as vulgar as the vulgarity it 
discloses. 

And yet how keen is Miss Austen's contempt when 
the occasion justifies it ! Nowhere else is her swift 
wit so well employed as when piercing some affected 
extravagance, or some indecorous vulgarism. In all 
her books there is not a single page of broad comedy ; 
the wit is as subtle as frost-work, the humor as deli- 
cate as dew. She is always the gentlewoman, appar- 
ently unconscious of, because consciously refusing 
to see, coarse colors. There is a look of disdain, a 
quick lifting of the eyebrows, a shooting glance from 
the hazel eyes, and it is done. 

She is the very impossibility he would describe; if indeed 
he has now delicacy of language enough to embody his own 
ideas. 

He was a stout young man of middling height, who, with 
a plain face and ungraceful form, seemed fearful of being 
too handsome unless he wore the dress of a groom, and 
too much like a gentleman unless he were easy where he 
ought to be civil, and imprudent where he might be allowed 
to be easy. 



3 50 Jane Austen 

Elinor agreed to it all, for she did not think he deserv'ed 
the compliment of rational opposition. 

This capacity for restraint places her strongest 
heroines on secure levels with able men without sub- 
tracting from their feminine charm; for restraint in 
speech is supposed to be an intellectual faculty given 
in its superior excellence only to the stronger sex. 
Yet Elinor is here akin to the gentleman Mr. Ham- 
erton tells us of, who never disputed with his French 
mother-in-law because of the known futility of the 
outcome: when, because accustomed to use ' Algerie^ 
and ' Afriqjte^ as convertible terms, she would main- 
tain, for example, that the Cape of Good Hope be- 
longed to France because Africa belonged to France, 
he would cheerfully reply, " Out, chere mh'e. Vous 
avez raisony 

Indeed, the position of women is so much firmer 
with Jane Austen than with Miss Burney that we 
must attribute the difference to a finer conception 
rather than to any change in manners that may have 
crept in in the few years between the two. The full 
power of restraint is now used for the first time in 
fiction. It is not only because Miss Austen's scenes 
are removed, for the most part, from the contamina- 
tion of the " great world " that her heroines are not 
offered the surprising facilities of falling into scrapes 
that fascinated the attention of Miss Burney. She 
knew that world, at least through books, and we can 
fancy her reading the current fiction with an easy 
smile on her lips as she detects some exaggerated 
" sensibility," and inwardly compares it perhaps with 
the simple proud standard of her own " sense." The 
" world " which touched Evelina in the person of Sir 



Her Place 351 

Clement Willoughby gets toned down to the " world " 
which touches Fanny Price in the person of Henry 
Crawford. In passing to Miss Austen we leave the 
old familiar situation, in which, to the " inexpressible 
confusion " of the heroine, the hero drops " on one 
knee " in the act of his declaration ; the heroine 
meantime " scarcely breathes," the *' blood forsakes 
her cheeks," " her feet refuse to sustain her." Then 
the hero " hastily rises " (with his one knee) and 
" supports " her to a chair, " upon which she sinks 
almost lifeless." It was her ladylike delicacy, her 
feeling for proportion, her distaste for faults against 
taste, her conceptions all constantly checked and 
challenged by a never-failing sense of humor that 
discovered the false " sensibility," in the place of 
which she set up the true. 

Consider the occasion of this outburst: "'Deny 
me not, most charming of women,' cried he, ' deny 
me not this only moment that is lent me, to pour 
forth my soul into your gentle ears,' " etc., etc. Sir 
Clement has hurried Evelina into a carriage away 
from the others of her party and given the driver a 
wrong direction in order to press his suit with a girl 
who grows more and more frightened as she realizes the 
situation. One would suppose that the infinite cunning 
and pertinacious plotting to accomplish the one ob- 
ject which apparently ever animated the breasts of 
the eighteenth-century " men of the world " would, in 
this case, have been wise enough to avoid the absurd- 
ity of expecting success over timidity by employing 
means of a particularly terrifying nature. Mackenzie's 
* Man of the World,' which may be taken as a sum- 
ming up of the characteristics of the eighteenth-cen- 
tury conception of its Lovelaces and its Sir Clement 



352 Jane Austen 

Willoughbys (this latter, however, being but a pale 
feminine reflection of the article), is a very different 
person from what we mean when we use the term ; and 
thanks, first of all, to Miss Austen that the difference 
exists. Think, madam, of your daughter " pursued" 
by some modern Sir Thomas, who thinks that he can 
best commend his gentility to her gentleness, and 
mollify the dislike which he feels she has for him, by 
such moderate and pacifying conduct as driving her, 
against her will, away from the only place where she 
will be safe, and seizing that of all moments to urge 
his claims. And this the " only moment " that is " lent '' 
him ! Unsuitability of situation and speech is gener- 
ally marked by the unnaturalncss of both. So we 
smile contentedly when we hear Sir Clement, about 
this time, addressing Evelina: "My dearest life, is it 
possible you can be so cruel? Can your nature and 
your countenance be so totally opposite? Can the 
sweet bloom upon those charming cheeks, which ap- 
pears as much the result of good-humor as of beauty," 
etc., etc. 

In Miss Burney's novels, gentlemen address young 
ladies in the street without introductions, and without 
any rebukes from accompanying chaperons. Every 
man seems to have been at liberty to insult every 
woman, and before we arrive at the last of our dear 
Evelina's adventures, we have wondered many times 
where were the police. These adventures, it is true, 
cease to alarm us as we proceed, for we come to a 
certain comforting knowledge, based on exceptionless 
examples of past experience, that at the supreme mo- 
ment Lord Orville will appear, and sighing will melt 
away in joy. I got into a little habit, when standing 
on the brink of one of these climaxes, of betting with 



Her Place 353 

myself that the next words would be, " just then who 
should come insight but Lord Orville ! " and I always 
won the bet. 

Yet this is the book that Burke sat up all night to 
finish, and over whose Mr. Smith, Johnson exclaimed, 
" Harry Fielding never drew so good a character ! " ^ 
It was great, for the times; and, as we have said, such 
an improvement morally on the preceding fiction as 
to fairly win for its author the domestic title she en- 
joys. But it was a simple age in its standards, or the 
great vogue of ' Evelina ' would not have been possible. 
It went through four editions in one year; ^ and when 
Mr. Austen wrote his publisher about ' Pride and Preju- 
dice,' he referred to the manuscript as likely to make 
a book of the same size as this, which was still, now 
some nineteen years since its first appearance, the most 
talked-of novel in print. I doubt if there is a pub- 
lisher on the green earth to-day who would receive its 
like ; whereas, supposing the twentieth-century coun- 
terpart of ' Northanger Abbey ' were, to-morrow, 
presented to any discriminating house, a repetition of 
the Bath episode would be equally impossible to real- 
ize in one's fancy. This is because Miss Austen 
struck the modern note, as well as that of her own 
time. She was natural ; and up to the limit she pur- 
posely set herself, one sees in her work a true reflec- 
tion of that time. But its grosser extravagances are 
suggested rather than dwelt upon ; hints take the 
place of delineations ; the particular is referred to the 
general, and the universal corrects the individual. So 

^ 'Diary and letters of Madame D'Arblay, edited by her Niece.' 
London. Published for Henry Colburn by his Successors, Hurst & 
Blatchett. 1854. vol. i., p. 63. 

2 See original preface to ' Cecilia.' 



354 J^n^ Austen 

an old-time heroine may for the first time appear be- 
fore the critical eyes of a new-time girl without awak- 
ening risibilities ; and whatever oddities of her century 
may cling to her have the effect of emphasizing the 
quaintness, without in the least widening the lines of 
divergence between the periods. ^ 

So only the gravest literary persons read Richard- 
son and Miss Burney and Miss Edgeworth to-day. Is 
there a single man of letters of your acquaintance 
under sixty years of age who can lay his hand upon 
his heart and swear that he has read all of Richard- 
son?''^ Is there one among them who has read the 
four novels of Miss Burney? Is not this the first in- 
timation to some that there are four? * Evelina/ yes ; 

^ This kinship to the modern idea is very evident in all her letters. 
One of the specimens given by Mr. Austen-Leigh to indicate " the live- 
liness of mind which imparted an agreeable flavor both to her corres- 
pondence and her conversation " is the following trifle which she hit 
off upon hearing of the marriage of a certain middle-aged flirt with a 
Mr. Wake : 

" Maria, good-humored and handsome and tall| 

For a husband was at her last stake ; 

And having in vain danced at many a ball, 

Is now happy to jump at a Wake." — Memoirs, p. 260. 

This sounds as if it had been written for last week's comic paper ; and 
her more serious essays in prose suggest, one hundred years before 
her time, the light and graceful style of Miss Repplier. 

2 It is difficult to see how it could be done to-day without stimu- 
lants. Nothing but a sense of the importance of an acquaintance with 
the " father of the English novel " [he should more properly be called 
the father of the English realistic novel, as the more general title is, 
by rights, Defoe's] saves the student, to whom very likely, it is an in- 
tolerable bore on account of the reiteration ad infinitum ; which is not 
variations on one theme, but a constant pounding of one note through 
endless volumes. Think of the size of it : there are about one million 
words in ' Clari.ssa,' which makes the work more than five times 
bigger than the longest of Miss Austen's, which is about the size of 
the average novel of the day. 



Her Place 355 

'Cecilia,' perhaps; but, honestly now, ' Camilla '? and 
* The Wanderer ' ? On the other hand, who that has 
ever read and appreciated one of Jane Austen's nov- 
els has not immediately read all the others? Nay, 
are they not among the immortal few that we read 
again and again? 



VIII 

It must be acknowledged, however, that they are 
not read by very many, and that they have never been 
"popular." They have not the human clutch of Miss 
Bronte's work upon the heart, and do not sound the 
depths of the spirit like George Eliot's. It is far 
more difficult to find reasons for the dislikes of non- 
literary readers than it is to find reasons for the likes 
of their opposites ; but we shall probably not be far 
wrong if we attribute the popular neglect of Jane 
Austen chiefly to the absence of passion in her books. 
Her avoidance of the high lights of others resulted in 
too tame a color scheme to please the majority, who, 
in the long run, do not care for the mere novel of 
character, unless passionately conceived. She is too 
quiet for those whose definition for all peaceful things 
is " stupid," and who fail to distinguish the varying 
degrees of quietness. And it should be noted that 
she never was a ** popular" novelist; which suggests 
that the "people" have about the same standard of 
likes and dislikes in each generation, although they 
may be at any time moved by some strange power 
controlling them against their will. Miss Austen's 
genius was not of that compelling kind. But it had 
the lasting qualities which proved it to be genius, and 
which, sooner or later, provokes discovery, and 



356 Jai^e Austen 

gathers to itself a constantly increasing discern- 
ment. Herein lies the essential difference between 
Miss Austen and Miss Burney, that, whereas the 
latter was immensely popular, she is not read to-day 
— in other words, she has fallen from her popularity — 
Miss Austen, no more popular then than now, has 
never suffered such an eclipse; but among the dis- 
cerning, from then till now, her fame has been con- 
stantly increasing. And it is a legitimate hope that 
this number will so continue to increase as to finally 
merge the "discerning" into the "popular." 

" Popular " pedestals are naturally insecure : Miss 
Austen's fame is safe, partly because it never rested 
upon one. 

IX 

It is astonishing how slowly this appreciation grew, 
and how little the rare quality of the work was recog- 
nized during her lifetime. I do not know of any 
equal neglect elsewhere ; her case is singularly apart 
from others. 

Jane Austen's life has always been regarded as 
peculiarly free from the besetting cares of the 
author; and if a life without a history is a happy 
one, hers was indeed the happiest of all. It is a 
pleasant story of domestic peace that her chief bi- 
ographer tells,^ and there is scarcely a murmur to 

1 'The novels of Jane Austen. Lady Susan, the Watsons. With 
a Memoir by her Nephew, J. E. Austen-Leigh.' Boston : Little, Brown, 
& Co., 1899. This is the second edition, a valuable addition to which 
is the cancelled chapter of 'Persuasion.' The first edition (London, 
Bentley, 1870) contains less matter, and does not include the stories. 
The Memoir is a thin volume, dignified, tender, and in excellent taste ; 
and, with Lord Brabourne's book, forms the source of the inspiration 



Her Place 357 

break the secluded quiet from beginning to end. It 
was apparently a family that lived entirely to itself, — 
related, indeed, to great personages, as any one may 
discover who chooses to puzzle through Lord Bra- 
bourne's genealogies, but with an acquaintance limited 
to the society of its own rural neighborhood. With 
the exception of the father's death, there was no 
break in the contented circle until Jane herself was 
called away ; and the gentle shadow of Cassandra's 
lost love, and the financial troubles of Henry, near 
the close of Jane's career, were the only clouds upon 
the almost unbroken prosperity of that long summer 
day of her life. There seems to have been no desire 
on the part of her father to enlarge his acquaintance ; 
and his sons, like himself, cultured but retiring men, 
remained content in their narrow stations ; this habit 
of privacy pertaining even to that brother who rose 
to the highest rank in the British navy; for, though 
dying full of honors, we have to search the official 
records for our knowledge of his distinguished ser- 
vices. I cannot agree with Mr. Adams that the 
lack of recognition which we have noticed is devoid 
of pathos, on the ground that she received as much 
as the taste of the age would allow, or induce her to ex- 
pect. ^ I think there is an exceeding pathos in those 
years of waiting, she knowing instinctively, all the time, 
her strength ; and her father's responsibility for the 
gaps between writing and publishing has not been suffi- 

of the subsequent biographies, some of which are not much more 
than synopses of the novels ; the one critical exception being Prof. 
Goldwin Smith's monograph (' Life of Jane Austen,' by Goldwin 
Smith. London, Walter Scott, 1890). [All references to Mr. Austen- 
Leigh's book in this Study relate to this edition.] 

1 ' The Story of Jane Austen's Life,' by Oscar Fay Adams. Chi- 
cago : A. C. McClurg & Co., April, 1891, pp. 13, 14. 



35 8 Jane Austen 

ciently pointed out. Instead of sending the manuscript 
of ' Pride and Prejudice ' to Cadell, he writes about it. 
As the author was entirely unknown, the pubHsher, 
wearily recalling, no doubt, the many manuscripts he 
had received from young lady aspirants in country 
towns, entertaining visions of repeating Miss Burney's 
success, naturally puts the proposition to death by 
return of post; and 'Pride and Prejudice' is not 
published until sixteen years later. The Reverend 
George Austen is not the first "handsome proctor" 
who, settled in some sleepy parish, lets his wits grow 
fat at the expense of his family's credit; and his 
greatest punishment is that he did not live to know 
that his daughter was a recognized author, for not 
one of her books came out in his lifetime. If we are 
visited in the land of shadows with an accusing knowl- 
edge of our omissions on earth, perhaps it was his lot 
to mingle his grief with her regret that he was not 
with her to enjoy the fruition of a work which, by a 
more strenuous effort on his part, might have been 
accomplished before the separation. 

There seems, indeed, to have been a lethargy about 
that country parsonage life, a conservatism grown 
into an almost fatalistic habit. " Lethargy " is about 
the last word one would apply to Jane Austen's quick 
perceptions and ready wit; but the effort to publish 
was constantly arrested by a kind of sleeping-sickness, 
— periods of inactivity hindering the fulfilment of 
terms of industry. There were, as we have said, six- 
teen years between the writing and the publishing 
of 'Pride and Prejudice.' 'Sense and Sensibility' 
was not printed until fourteen years after it was 
begun. ' Northanger Abbey ' was written five years 
before it was prepared for the press, and then reposed, 



Her Place 359 

forgotten and unclaimed for several years longer 
in the safe of a Bath publisher. She began two 
stories which she never finished, and she finished one 
which she never published. Two of her novels, one 
of which was the earliest sold, she did not live to see 
in print. These facts are not set forth complainingly, 
— for as we possess the happy outcome, it is a matter 
of no moment, now, — but by way of illustrating the 
advantage on the side of those whose inward call is 
hurried by the outward circumstance. There was 
too much affluence with Jane ; there was no com- 
pulsion to write; it was an amusement, chiefly; she 
was too easily queen in her small circle. And yet 
the family did not exalt her, for, with all their cheer- 
ful pride in her accomplishments, they shared the 
unapprehension of the age as to the greatness of her 
distinction. 



X 

She lived in stirring times, but there is no trace 
whatever of them in her letters ^ or her books. She 

1 Mr. Austen-Leigh's biography was supplemented in 1884 by 
' Letters of Jane Austen. Edited with an Introduction and Critical 
Remarks by Edward, Lord Brabourne.' Two vols., London, Richard 
Bentley and Son. The great-nephew here supplements the work of 
the nephew with a large collection of Jane's letters, almost all of 
which are addressed to her sister Cassandra. They are just such 
letters as one acquainted with the novels would expect ; bright, hu- 
morous, full of the gossip of the neighborhood, never intended for 
other eyes than the sister's, and without any public interest. It is a 
grave question whether such letters should be published; and there 
can be no doubt whatever that if Jane could have fancied the possi- 
bility of such an event, she would have very indignantly forbidden it. 
Lord Brabourne would have served his purpose by printing, say two 
dozen of the best of these letters ; the rest is repetition. 

They are, at all events, honest, and delightfully correspond, in tone 



360 Jane Austen 

was satisfied with the parish. Not that she was 
narrow in her judgments, and fancied the parish at 
a metropoHtan eminence : it was an elegant indiffer- 

and spirit, with the fiction. Compare, for example, her defence of 
novel reading in ' Northanger Abbey' with " I have received a very 
civil note from Mrs. Martin requesting my name as a subscriber to 
her library. ... As an inducement to subscribe, Mrs. Martin tells 
me that her collection is not to consist only of novels, but of every 
kind of literature, etc. She might have spared this pretension to 
our family, who are great novel readers, and not ashamed of being 
so; but it was necessary, I suppose, to the self-consequence of half 
her subscribers " [vol 1., p. 178]. And we see the humorous impa- 
tience which, for the public, took form in Miss Bates, here reflected in 
private : " The Webbs are really gone ! When I saw the wagons at 
the door and thought of all the trouble they must have in moving, 
I began to reproach myself for not having liked them better, but since 
the wagons have disappeared, my conscience has been closed again, 
and I am excessively glad they are gone" [vol. ii., p. 319]. 

We get in these letters, in short, just what a careful reader of her 
books would expect. The delightful impromptu balls of the novels 
are the counterparts of those Steventon affairs so vivaciously de- 
scribed to her sister ; and we prefer to associate that innocent, roguish 
face which Lord Brabourne has selected for his frontispiece, rather 
than that better known picture with the hideous cap, assumed too 
early by ' Aunt ' Jane, with the gaieties in which she took such a 
prominent part, — going through twenty dances on one occasion, 
without fatigue ; and they were not our easy waltzes, either. 

But there is too much of it, and there is not the excuse for a long- 
winded effort which prevails when the letters present interesting 
views on varied topics and exchanges of opinion with distinguished 
correspondents. A thinker's opinions are always interesting — to 
thinkers. But there was a total unacquaintance with the many cele- 
brated men of the day, intercourse with whom would have spurred her 
intellect into a keener atmosphere than that surrounding this exchange 
of family confidences. Jane was capable of criticising Kean's Shy- 
lock, but all she says to Cassandra is that she is "quite satisfied" 
with it [vol. ii., p. 218]. Doubtless she would have had suggestive 
things to say about Byron had she, like Miss Edgeworth, had Walter 
Scott for a correspondent, instead of the sister, to whom it is suffi- 
cient to write : " I have read the ' Corsair,' mended my petticoat, and 
have nothing else to do " [vol. ii., p. 222]. Nor do we get any 
account of those engaging details concerning the publishing of an 
author's famous books which adds to the interest of so many biog- 



Her Place 361 

ence to things outside, not a rustic conceit, that 
magnified her people and place; and the place was 
magnified only because it happened to be the home 
of the people. Referring to some calamity, she ex- 
claims : " How horrible it is to have so many people 
killed ! And what a blessing that one cares for none 
of them !"^ Yet here it is George Eliot and not Jane 
Austen who is the more unusual, for most of us bear 
the losses of others with equanimity. 

This close partnership pertained even to literary 
matters, in which, one would suppose, the self-knowl- 
edge of her superiority would have caused a little 
more seclusion from her home circle and a little more 
widening out to her brothers and sisters of the pen. 
But no. She writes to an aspiring niece, about the 
success of whose manuscript she probably entertained 
critical doubts : " I have made up my mind to like no 
novels but Miss Edgeworth's, yours, and my own; "^ 
and she generously contrasts the " strong, manly, vigor- 
ous sketches, full of variety and glow " which a nephew 
has submitted to her friendly criticism, with her own 
miniature effects.^ If she did not consider her writ- 
ing as her contribution to a family symposium, there 
was at least a playful and modest assumption to that 
effect. It is an indication of the peculiar privacy of 
this pleasant family that the only literary confidences 

raphies : one would like to know, for example, how Murray came to 
succeed Egerton as her publisher. 

And so we say that to give us two octavo volumes is a little too 
much. Two dozen letters would have been as good as two hundred. 
We do not in the least share the great-nephew's lamen-t that the 
letters of his other great-aunt have been destroyed. Like Mr. Wood- 
house, we like our gruel thin. 

^ Brabourne, vol. ii., p. 109. 2 /^_^ vol. ii., p. 318. 

3 Austen-Leigh, p. 310. 



362 Jane Austen 

of Miss Austen were with those children of her 
brothers who themselves had yearnings in the direc- 
tion of letters ; and it is further significant of her 
unassuming helpfulness and gentle affection that she 
conveys her criticisms in terms of such equal partner- 
ship. Those were fortunate nieces and nephews who 
had a Jane Austen for an " Aunt Jane," too much of 
whose time they unwittingly occupied with manuscripts 
of fiction which she must have suspected would 
never see the light of day, but which she never- 
theless discussed with them with such ungrudging 
fulness.^ 

Her letters show her a thorough woman of the 
world, little though her world was, with such a real 
delight in its obvious pleasures as to shut out the 
considerations of the larger world outside. And yet 
her view is everywhere private and domestic, for the 
" worldly " attitude obtains in the quietest surround- 
ings, and one may be a " man " or " woman of the 
world," and still care chiefly for one's own fireside. 
In her last immortal work, it is the dreadful solitude 
of Charlotte Bronte's heroine which gives the tragic 
touch to her portrayal. There were no sisterly con- 
fidences there, for the sisters who had been were not. 
On the other hand, one has only to think of Elizabeth 
and Jane Bennet, Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, 
Henrietta and Louisa Musgrove, Fanny and Susan 
Price, Julia and Maria Bertram, Emma and Mrs. John 
Knightley, to see how the sweetest relationship of their 
creator's life was reflected in the best of these groups, 
and how the worst got hints for its depiction from the 

^ One wishes that the phonograph had been in use then and em- 
ployed to take down those impromptu fairy stories she continued for 
days to the delight of her brother's children. 



Her Place 363 

contrasting shadows. It would seem that nothing 
beyond this domestic Hfe moved her. The French 
cousin who was an inmate of the parsonage during 
Jane's formative period, and whose father had perished 
in the Revolution, was more useful in helping her 
get up private theatricals than in supplying the 
material for thoughts that were beginning to shake 
the world. Of Southey's ' Life of Nelson,' she says : 
" I am tired of Lives of Nelson, being that I never 
read any ; " ^ and she makes it apparent that her only 
interest in public affairs is because of her sailor 
brothers' connection therewith. " This peace will be 
turning all our rich naval officers ashore," says Sir 
Walter Elliot's lawyer to him one morning. " They 
will all be wanting a home." That is how the abdi- 
cation of Napoleon is reflected in Miss Austen's 
novels. No wonder that Mme. de Stael thought 
' Pride and Prejudice' " vulgaire^'"^ — a term that has 
been misunderstood by some of Miss Austen's com- 
mentators. She is the very opposite of everything 
vulgar, as we commonly apply the word. The 
Frenchwoman, responsive to the ideas awakened 
by the Revolution — ideas furiously active in her own 
' Corinne,' — could not understand the unconcern of 
this evidently brilliant contemporary, whose thoughts 
were occupied with balls and tea-drinkings and the 
mild flirtations of curates while Europe was seething 
with the activities of an awakened hope. This pas- 
sionless impersonality was what aggravated Charlotte 
Bronte in Miss Austen, whose " mild eyes " reflected 

1 Brabourne, vol. ii., p. 175. 

2 ' Madame de Stael, Her Friends and her Influence in Politics 
and Literature,' by Lady Blennerhassett, 3 vols. London : Chapman 
and Hall, 1889, vol. iii., p. 455. 



364 Jaiie Austen 

none of the troubles which in one way or another 
move most of the great writers to literary expression. 
Mme. de Stael, therefore, reading Miss Austen in the 
light of her own flame, thought ' Pride and Preju- 
dice' ^'trivial" which is all she could have meant by 
" vulgaire" 

Our author was a Gallio caring for none of these 
things. It might be said that she did care for them, 
but was clever enough to avoid the incongruity of in- 
troducing them into her peculiarly domestic scheme; 
and it is true that she had, in a more singular degree 
than most, that nice discrimination which would 
justify such a defence, were it not remembered that 
when the heart is full of a subject, that is the sub- 
ject chosen for discussion. Had she been moved 
by the urgency of the times, as was the author of 
* Corinne,' as was later the author of ' Middle- 
march,' we should have had a different outcome. 
To be sure, it was only a faint echo of that conflict 
which reached the country parishes of England, still 
remote by reason of bad roads in an age before 
steam had annihilated distance.^ Notwithstanding 
the change slowly coming over the face of English 
life and letters, it was still the dull era; the deep 
motives at work under the transition not yet show- 
ing effect on the surface. And while every great 
artist is in some way superior to his times. Miss 

1 It was not yet a time of general travel. We learn from Miss 
Burney that to reach Kensington in those days, one had to take a 
coach from London ; and from Miss Edgeworth that there was a turn- 
pike between Grosvenor Square and Knightsbridge. Much of the 
unrest of modern fiction is nursed by globe-trotting. Dorothea's 
awakening from restful supposition to restless realities came in Rome. 
Miss Austen's career was bounded by one or two countries of an 
England not yet disturbed by too easy facilities for escape. 



Her Place 365 

Austen's superiority was not in that sympathetic 
strength which, seizing on a new generous idea, is 
able to build on it a beautiful structure of hope 
and love. She was a realist, with an imagination 
held in check by the little ironies of time and 
place ; a domestic realist, therefore confined in her 
view; domestic in the purest sense, and admirable 
in consequence ; but still, because a realist, reflect- 
ing as much of the coarseness of the time as her 
elegant discrimination would allow. There must be 
something either of philosophy, or romanticism, or 
aestheticism, or pure personal suffering in an au- 
thor's work to make it appeal to the majority; 
there was none of these things in Jane Austen's, 
unless it was the philosophy which recommended 
silence where there was not sympathy, which is 
sometimes the wisest philosophy of all. 

It is amusing to read of Mme. de Stael's desire to 
meet the author of * Pride and Prejudice ' rebuked 
by the declaration that she did not wish to be met 
as an author, but as a lady; and the Frenchwoman 
might have replied, as Voltaire did on a similar oc- 
casion, that she did not have to travel out of France 
to meet ladies. The episode is characteristic of the 
Austen privacy, and it has an interest in that it was 
almost the only actual opportunity Jane ever had of 
meeting a distinguished stranger, although the oppor- 
tunity might frequently have been found but for this 
seclusion, which was not, on the one hand, a proud 
aloofness, nor on the other, due to shyness and 
bashful modesty, but was simply a satisfaction' with 
existing conditions, they being very pleasant. She 
certainly did not rise superior to her times in her 
attitude towards Mme. de Stael, for her answer indi- 



366 Jane Austen 

cates a fear of being mistaken for a female pedant ; 
the idea of the sexlessness of genius not yet having 
arisen. 



XI 

This lack of public spirit was not wholly due to the 
times, nor to the position of women then : witness the 
keen interest of Mrs. Barbauld concerning the Test 
Act, and her poem to Wilberforce. It was due rather 
to an isolation more mental than physical, which she 
did not strive to break. Recall the men who made Bath 
brilliant in the first years of the past century. These 
were they who probably met Miss Austen every fine 
morning on their strolls to and from the Pump Room, 
without ever knowing that the sprightly young 
woman to whom perhaps they gave a glance of care- 
less admiration as they passed, was the author of a story 
having as its centre of interest that same Bath, and des- 
tined to help materially in the evolution of fiction from 
romantic impossibilities to conceivable realities, — a 
story lying forgotten at that moment in a publisher's 
office in that very city. And as slie passed them, know- 
ing who they were and what they had done, and know- 
ing that she had already written three novels which 
ranked her as worthy of their most respectful salu- 
tations, but which, as she had made none but the 
most futile efiforts to publish them, were, so far as that 
distinguished company was concerned, no better than 
unwritten, — as this momentarily challenged her at- 
tention, I think she must have suffered some compunc- 
tions. For I believe that she knew that her work was 
great. The playful references which she makes, in the 
letters to her sister, to her favorite creations, as if they 



Her Place 367 

were real personages, proves a live interest ; and 
her resentment of the manner of the acknowledgment 
of ' Emma ' on the part of the Prince of Wales, after, at 
his own suggestion, that work had been dedicated to 
him, showed that she was alive to slights. The First 
Gentleman thanked her for the handsome copy she 
had sent him ; whereupon Miss Austen says : '' What- 
ever he may think of vty share of the work, yours 
seems to have been quite right." ^ She knew that her 
work was great, and she felt that she had a distinct 
call to write — of that, too, I am convinced. Indeed, 
one of the indications of her genius is that she re- 
sponded to this call, notwithstanding the surroundings 
which opposed it. The pressure from without was in 
the contrary direction : the only excitation was from 
within, and it was great enough to overcome the 
opposition. 

Yet she deliberately chose anonymity, and she was 
barely discovered before she died. This was not 
because of any isolation which convention then 
required of her sex. Mrs. Barbauld numbered among 
her friends Johnson, Fox, Priestley, and Howard. 
Lamb talked about her, and Rogers came to her 
three-o'clock dinners. She had the advantage of 
having Dr. Aikin for her brother. Miss Edgeworth 
was fortunate, too, in the possession of a father with a 
distinguished acquaintance. She was very intimate 
with the Barbaulds ; the famous Dr. Beddoes was her 
brother-in-law; the elder Darwin, and Day, of ' Sand- 
ford and Merton ' fame were her father's friends ; and 
there is a striking chapter in her ' Memoirs' of her visit 
to Mme. de Genlis. " They seem," says Mrs. Ritchie, in 
her * Book of Sibyls,' " to have come in for everything 
1 Austen-Leigh, p. 279. In a letter to her publisher. 



368 Jane Austen 

that was brilliant, fashionable, and entertaining. They 
breakfast with poets, they sup with marquises, they 
call upon duchesses and scientific men." Both Byron 
and Moore thought her charming, and the Duke of 
Wellington composed verses in her honor. 

As Mrs. Barbauld's brother and Miss Edgeworth's 
father assisted their relatives to widening literary ex- 
periences, so did the husband of Mrs. Opie help her; 
for, although he had lost his fashionable following by 
the time of his marriage, he had retained such pow- 
erful friends as Erskine and Sheridan. Sir James 
Mackintosh, Godwin, Mrs. Inchbald, Sydney Smith, 
Home Tooke, knew this amiable lady, who also en- 
joyed the Athenian privilege of residence in Norwich. 
Before her retirement from the world, Hannah More 
was the idol of the most brilliant society of the day; 
and after that, Horace Walpole used to visit his " holy 
Hannah " at Cowslip Green. We know how Dr. 
Johnson made a celebrity of Fanny Burney. Mrs. 
Grant of Laggan writes to Mrs. Hemans, " praised by 
all that read you, and known in some degree wherever 
our language is spoken." Even Miss Mitford had a 
wide acquaintance. Talfourd introduced her to Mac- 
ready. Charlotte Cushman played her Claudia, and 
Young and Charles Kemble were the actors of her 
hero parts. Scott and Mackenzie wrote prologues 
and epilogues for Joanna Baillie. Byron dedicated 
verses to Lady Blessington, and Lawrence painted 
her portrait. 

But there are compensations in most situations. 
Miss Austen was at least unharassed by her father, 
whereas the best and most enduring portions of Miss 
Edgeworth's works are those in which her father did 
not interpolate, nearly all the didacticism by which 



Her Place 369 

she is chiefly but not justly remembered being due to 
his interfering zeal. Mr. Austen was a just man of 
unspotted reputation, whereas Miss Mitford's works 
were, in large part, the outcome of a bitter urgency 
to pay the debts of a reckless parent, the anxious 
hurry manifesting itself in the strained result. The 
unfortunate adoption of Johnson's style by Miss Bur- 
ney was doubtless due to his literary sponsorship, and 
makes her later works unreadable. 1 [And a father's 
unwise zeal also hurried 'Cecilia' forward to its 
detriment.^] Mrs. Barbauld's brother apparently did 
not prevent his sister from falling into the same imi- 
tation in at least one of her essays, whereas Miss 
Austen's brothers exercised no disturbing influence 
upon her style, although it is evident that at least 
two of them enjoyed a quiet sympathy with her tal- 
ent, which occasionally took the form of active, but not 
overbearing helpfulness. The elder brother, James, 
the father of her biographer, was a Varsity man, in- 
terested in literature, and showed an unobtrusive and 
sobering influence upon the formation of her taste. 
The other brother, Henry, the least worthy in char- 
acter, seems to have been her chief literary adviser; 
and he it was who finally circumvented the Bath pub- 
lisher, which, in our judgment, covers a multitude of 
faults ; although to buy back a manuscript for the 
same amount for which it had been sold some years 
previously has been characterized by some unduly 

1 Goldsmith's remark to Johnson, " Dr. Johnson, if you were to 
make little fishes talk, they would talk like whales," is, when applied 
to his copiers, still more ludicrous, for the doctor's would at least 
not be imitation whales. 

2 Preface to ' Cecilia,' by Annie Raine Ellis. London : Geo. Bell 
& Sons, 1890, p. xviii. 

24 



370 J^ne Austen 

anxious persons as sharp dealing, in that the ignorant 
man was kept in the dark as to the identity of the 
author, who had become famous since his purchase of 
the novel, of the surpassing merits of which he was so 
evidently uninformed. The transaction seems to me 
not only justifiable, but poetically just: some publish- 
ers get their punishment in this world. 

Indeed, it may readily be maintained that the nar- 
row but cultured environment of Miss Austen gained 
for her more than the fuller and socially wider lives 
of her contemporaries. It was a very harmonious 
family, bound together by cheerful affections, and 
with sufficient variations as to individualities to pre- 
vent monotony. Each member doubtless contrib- 
uted, quite unconsciously, his share of influence; we 
fancy that we can see, for example, how the lively 
dispositions of Edward and Henry helped to replen- 
ish the vials which fed her sense of humor, — and 
this kind of influence is manifestly better than the 
actually co-operative sort when that is exercised to 
the harm of natural expression. 



XII 

Whether for good or ill, her seclusion had the cer- 
tain effect of keeping her unknown and unappreciated 
for a long period. The Quarterly article of October, 
1815, was the first authoritative recognition, and this 
but two years before her death ! ^ That was not only 

1 A similar interest to that surrounding the * Jane Eyre ' criticism 
invests this article. Mr. Austen-Leigh refers to it as from an un- 
known pen, and criticises it for a laclt of acumen. Mr. Goldwin Smith 
also condemns it. Neither Icnew that it was Walter Scott's work, as 
we learn that it was from Lockhart. [' Memoir of the Life of Sir 



Her Place 371 

the first, it was the only notable criticism of her 
books which she ever saw; and she died supposing 
that the small portion of the world which knew her 
at all held her inferior to Miss Edgeworth and Miss 
Burney. It was five years afterwards that Dr. 
Whately's article was published.^ Then a nine 
years' silence, until a reviewer in the Edinburgh 
wrote : " Miss Austen has never been so popular as 
she deserved to be." ^ And it is interesting to note 
that the writer finds his reason for Miss Austen's 
unpopularity in her naturalness. As late as 1859 a 
writer in Blackwood's begins an essay on our au- 



Walter Scott, Bart.,' by J. G. Lockhart. Edinburgh: Adam and 
Charles Black, 1878, p. 472, note.] And this unwitting criticism of 
Scott for a lack of sympathy is amusingly odd, seeing that it was 
Scott who, more than any other, gave the most generous sympathy 
to other writers, and was the first to speak of the " exquisite touch " 
of Miss Austen, as compared with his " bow-wow " strain. [Ibid., 
p. 614.] It is interesting to note that in Whately's contribution of 
five years later, reference is made to this earlier criticism, thus, " We 
remarked in a former number," which might lead one to suppose 
either that Whately himself was its author, or that the Quarterly 
editor assumed the right, by manipulating the phraseology of his 
writers, to bring all contributions on a given subject into uniformity. 
As we know from Lockhart that the former hypothesis is not true, 
the conclusion may be that the latter is an explanation of the arbi- 
trary power which gave such a brutal strength to the papers of the 
Quarterly, especially as Lockhart himself hints that the style of the 
article " might have been considerably doctored by Mr. Gifford." Of 
course, the writer may have himself thus indicated his agreement 
with Sir Walter's opinion, the anonymous character of the Quarterly 
articles allowing such freedoms. In any case, but for Lockhart, the 
reference would only deepen the difficulty of authorship. And it 
adds to the entertainment of the situation that the very citation from 
Lockhart which Mr. Austen-Leigh makes (p. 289, footnote) to prove 
that Scott did not write the January, 1821, article is our authority for 
the assertion that he did write the October, 1815, review I 

1 Quarterly, vol. xxiv., pp. 352 seq. 

2 Edinburgh Riview, vol. li., pp. 448-457. 



372 Jane Austen 

thor by saying : " For nearly half a century England 
has possessed an artist of the highest rank, whose 
works have been extensively circulated, whose merits 
have been keenly relished, and whose name is still 
unfamiliar in men's mouths," ^ 

If Miss Austen's admirers have been few in com- 
parison with other novelists', they form at least a nota- 
ble set; and if the acknowledgment has been tardy, it 
has been select. What a pity that she did not know 
Scott's full opinion ! She did not know what Scott 
really thought; she had no information as to Lord 
Holland's appreciation; ^ she died too soon for Ma- 
caulay's praise to reach her.^ She was not aware 
that Southey and Coleridge " had an equally high 
opinion of her merits."* No one was ever known to 
ask for her autograph. She never sat to Lawrence. 
No cheap edition of her novels was published until 
fifty years after her death, when the ' Memoirs ' awak- 

1 Among the magazine articles on Jane Austen, let me commend 
in particular that of the North Bjitish Rez'iew, vol. lii., p. 129. An 
instructive paper by Mr. Adams, in the New Englatid Magazine, 
vol. viii., pp. 594^^5'., contains illustrations of Steventon, Bath, Lyme- 
Regis, Chawton, and Winchester. Another illustrated article, with 
an older set of pictures, may be found in Harper's for July, 1870. 

2 ' Recollections of Past Life,' by Sir Henry Holland, Bart., M. D. 
F. R. S., etc. New York : D. Appleton & Co., 1872, p. 231. 

' " But amidst the infinite variety of lighter literature, with which 
he beguiled his leisure, 'Pride and Prejudice' and the five sister 
novels, remained without a rival in his affections. He never for a 
moment wavered in his allegiance to Miss Austen. In 1858 he notes 
in his journal, * If I could get materials, I really would write a short 
life of that wonderful woman, and raise a little money to put up a 
monument to her in Winchester Cathedral.' " [' Life and Letters of 
Lord Macaulay,' by his nephew, G. Otto Trevelyan. 2 vols. New 
York : Harper & Bros., 1876, vol. ii., p. 394. See also the Edin- 
burgh Review, vol. Ixxxvii., p. 561.] 

* ' Memoir and Letters of Sara Coleridge,' edited by her daughter. 
2 vols. London : Henry S. King & Co., 1873, v°^- "• P- 75- 



Her Place 272 

ened a tardy interest. Yet of her Sara Coleridge 
wrote, " the most faultless of female novelists," ^ and 
the great Jowett asks : " Have you thoroughly made 
yourself up in Miss Austen, the ' Vicar of Wakefield,' 
and Boswell? No person is educated who does not 
know them." ^ Newman read her books through 
yearly to improve his style, and Tennyson spoke of 
her as next to Shakspere.^ She is the critic's novel- 
ist, as Spenser is the poet's poet. In a letter to Mur- 
ray, Gifford praises 'Pride and Prejudice ' as " a very 
pretty thing. No dark passages; no secret cham- 
bers ; no wind howlings in long galleries ; no drops 
of blood upon a rusty dagger, — things that should 
now be left to ladies' maids and sentimental washer- 
women." * This appreciation ought not to be sur- 
prising. What the Quarterly dissectors could not 
understand was spiritual newness and the tempestu- 
ous qualities of genius. The opposite of what it 
condemned in Charlotte Bronte was to be discovered 
in Miss Austen. The evenness of manner, the light- 
ness of touch, the unruffled temper, the freedom from 
exaggeration, the uniform fineness, the writing, all 

1 ' Memoir and Letters of Sara Coleridge.' 

2 ' Life and Letters of Benjamin Jowett, M. A.,' by Evelyn Abbott 
and Lewis Campbell. 2 vols. New York : E. P. Button & Co., 1897, 
vol. ii. p. 338. 

2 ' Autobiography of Henry Taylor.' 2 vols. New York : Harper 
& Bros., 1885, vol. ii., p. 160. In this conversation, the laureate 
thanks God that no letters of Jane's had been preserved. Lord Bra- 
bourne's little indiscretions must have added gloom to his closing 
years. 

* ' A Publisher and his Friends. Memoirs and Correspondence 
of the late John Murray,' by Samuel Smiles. 2 vols. London : John 
Murray. New York : Chas. Scribner's Sons, 1891, vol. i., p. 282. 
And at that moment ' Northanger Abbey,' ridiculing these very 
things, was lying forgotten and unclaimed in a publisher's drawer in 
Bath I 



374 ]^^^ Austen 

unconscious, as if a French Academy was watching 
her, — this would dehght a critic like Gififord, whose 
devotion to the classical ideal was, negatively, not 
upset by any revolutionary thoughts in the perusal 
of Miss Austen's fiction, and was, positively, stimu- 
lated by such perfection of form, disclosing the com- 
pletest natural method. The newness of Jane Austen, 
highly important as it was, was not a supernatural 
newness ; it was a return to nature quite within the 
approving understanding of a Quarterly reviewer. 
For this reason. Miss Austen has a following of pecu- 
liar strength, although it be small in numbers; and the 
ability to appreciate her has come to be regarded as 
one of the marks of a delicate culture. "First and 
foremost," says George Eliot, " let Jane Austen be 
named as the greatest artist that has ever written, 
using the term to signify the most perfect mastery 
over the means to her end, ... To read one of her 
books is like an actual experience of life. . . . Only 
cultivated minds fairly appreciate the exquisite art of 
Jane Austen." 

We find her commended where we should ordinarily 
turn last of all for judgments on novels. In a letter 
quoted by Mr, Austen-Leigh, Miss Quincy refers 
thus to Chief Justice Marshall and Justice Story: 
" To them we owe our introduction to her society." ^ 
Even Mr. Saintsbury, who is generally rude to the 
ladies, says, " We shall have another Homer before 
we see another Jane," 

And yet it is of the essence of irony that almost the 

only appreciation she ever received while in the flesh 

was from the very last source whence it would be 

looked for. In the unpublished diary of Lord Rob- 

1 Austen-Leigli, pp. 297-298. 



Her Place 375 

ert Seymour, the most decorous exploit of the First 
Gentleman in England, — an exploit which, as com- 
pared with others chronicled, might be held up as a 
model of polite behavior — is thus set forth : " At an 
assembly he beckoned to the poor old Duchess of 
Bedford across a large room, and when she had taken 
the trouble of crossing the room, he very abruptly 
told her that he had nothing to say to her." This 
was the royal blackguard whose " permission " to 
dedicate ' Emma ' to himself was necessarily regarded 
in the light of a command by the unfortunate author- 
ess, who, however, got her quantum of amusement 
out of it in her negotiations with the entertaining Mr. 
Clarke. This surprising discrimination on the part of 
the prince has been imputed to him for righteous- 
ness. I am not so sure. Only last week I heard a 
young woman confess, in one breath, her equal fond- 
ness for George Eliot and Marie Corelli. 

XIII 

It might not be uninteresting to conclude this sec- 
tion of our subject with a cursory survey of the 
lighter manners and customs which this distinguished 
lady will always make to live again for us as long as 
her novels are read by a delighted public. 

It was a day when a gentleman might use a knife 
to convey food to his mouth, because it was the day 
before silver forks. Potatoes were eaten only with 
the roast. A hostess did not then invite her dinner 
guests with the fell purpose of paralyzing them with 
envy at the variety of her china, which is now, we 
are told, the sole reason for the swift succession of 
courses ; there was rather the housewifely pride in 



376 J^ne Austen 

the superiority of her game pies and home-brewed 
mead. It was a day when people dined at four 
or five o'clock, and friends, coming thereto in a 
chaise and four, perhaps with postilions, stayed 
to tea afterwards, concluding with a supper at 
eleven. The elegance of the table was heightened 
by a hundred burning candles, and no meats were 
served a la Russe, — no, indeed, the host had to do 
some heavy carving. On less elaborate occasions 
they feasted on " cold souse," and they always 
died of " putrid sore throat" instead of " malignant 
diphtheria," 

In the country districts, such as Jane Austen lived 
in, instead of attending meetings of women's clubs, 
ladies employed their spare time in spinning the 
thread for the household linen, for the spinning- 
jennies had not yet entirely taken the place of the 
Jennies spinning. It was a day when young ladies 
made use of their beaux in parliament to obtain 
franks for their correspondence ; ^ when they paid 
visits of ceremony with their hands encased in 
muffs of gigantic size, and wearing puce-colored 
sarsenets; when they might appear in the street 
wearing simultaneously an India muslin dress and 
a fur boa ; and when they paid morning calls in 
peaked caps and pelisses. But it was a day late 
enough for a Jane Fairfax to have a grand piano 
instead of a spinet. 

A woman was then a "female" — to whom laven- 
der drops were applied when she fainted, which she 
was doing pretty constantly — not Jane's females, 
however. Roads were not then " muddy," but " dirty," 
and pattens had not gone out. A carriage drive was 
1 Brabourne, vol. ii., p. 172. 



Her Place 377 

called what it really was, a " sweep." Palmer's coaches 
were adding a new pleasure to life ; and the tribe of 
stay-makers, according to a pamphleteer of 1798/ 
were " likely to be thrown into extreme distress be- 
cause the female sex have thought proper to throw off 
their bodices." Linen was taking the place of silk, 
and the unpoetical shoe-string was the successor to 
the silver buckle. 

In the higher classes, horse-racing was ousting the 
cock-fight from its pre-eminence as the leading diver- 
sion for idle moments, Mrs. Selwyn will not venture 
in a " phaeton " with a young buck as long as her will 
is unsigned, its height being apparently regarded as 
the dangerous objection : the carriages which ladies 
used were called " chariots." It was the day when the 
measured minuet was passing, probably because 
swords were ceasing to be worn, and to dance the 
minuet without getting the sword between the legs 
was the chief mark of distinction. The waltz had not 
been introduced, and as the partners were separated 
in the country dance, it must have been a good deal 
of a bore to the spirited belles of Miss Austen's time. 
The umbrella with which Dr. Grant rescues Fanny 
Price from the rain may have been his own, but a few 
years earlier he could not have appeared on a London 
street with it without having been mobbed, as the 
frank British public was wont to manifest its disap- 
proval of the masculine use of a feminine article in 
this manner. 

It was a day when gentlemen wore high-crowned 
hats with curved brims, the cocked hat having been 
dropped in '93 ; when they had their hair cut, like 

1 ' Essay on the Political Circumstance of Ireland under Lord 
Camden,' p. 89. 



378 Jane Austen 

Frank Churchill, and ceased to powder it, — a change 
of fashion brought about, as Mr. Lecky supposes, by 
Pitt's tax on hair powder of a guinea a head ; and a 
day when, if they followed Fox, they wore a buff, and 
if they swore by Pitt, a scarlet waistcoat, and when 
ladies dressed their hair with foxes' tails to denote 
their devotion to the Whig cause.^ It was a day 
when Goldsmith's ' History ' was considered an au- 
thority and when it was elegant for a young lady to 
know a little Italian, but before German was much 
thought of, although Lady Susan writes to Mrs. John- 
son of the ^^ prevailing fashion of acquiring a perfect 
knowledge of all languages, arts, and sciences," — men- 
tioning German as one of the accomplishments which 
it is " throwing time away to be mistress of." It was 
still the day of stiff, angular chairs; but it is not safe 
to assert, either that ease of manners has come in 
with ease of furniture, or that the age of increasing 
luxuries is necessarily that of decreasing courtesy; 
for the literature of the times we are discussing 
abundantly shows that some young men were as rude 
then as their counterparts are now. The sofa was a 
sufficiently new and expensive comfort, in those days, 
to warrant a poem in its honor; and although we 
should now think the kind then used the reverse of 
comfortable, it ranked as such a luxury that when 
Jane Austen was ill, she dutifully forbore to use the 
only one in the house because it would be depriving 
her mother of its solace. 

Finally, it was a day when babies were farmed out, 
and we shudder to think of the possibilities surround- 
ing Jane's case; for, had she been exchanged like 
the babies of the comic operas, and as Evelina was 

1 Lounger, No. 10. 



Her Place 379 

exchanged by Dame Green, where would have been 
the Jane Austen whom we know?^ 

^ For full accounts of the customs and manners of the times, see 
Lecky's ' History,' vols. i. and vi., Fairholt's ' History of Costume,' 
Andrew's ' Eighteenth Century,' Wraxall's ' Memoirs,' and other 
authorities, not omitting the invaluable Annual Registers. 

It may be interesting to learn that Miss Austen received about ;iC700 
for all her books [_' A Publisher and His Friends. Memoir and 
Correspondence of the late John Murray,' by Samuel Smiles, 
LL.D., 2 vols., London : John Murray, vol. i., p. 283]; a sum which, 
of course, would have been materially increased had she begun to 
publish earlier. To those desirous of information concerning editions : 
The Messrs. Bentley and Sons were regarded for some time as the 
authorized publishers of the novels, they having bought the copy- 
rights some seventy years ago. This edition contains ' Lady Susan,' 
'The Watsons,' and Mr. Austen-Leigh's 'Life.' It is not illustrated, 
except for some fine steel frontispieces, and Jane Austen pre-emi- 
nently needs illustrating. A very pretty edition is that published by 
Messrs. J. M. Dent & Co. with colored prints by Cook; and the set 
published by Macmillan, illustrated by Brock and Thomson, and with 
introductions by Austin Dobson, is also attractive. Messrs. Little, 
Brown, & Co. issue an excellent edition, including the supplementary 
works and the Memoir, which are omitted in the Macmillan and 
Dent volumes. 



B. — HER WONDERFUL CHARM 



The simile of miniature painting which has so 
frequently been applied to her work is her own inven- 
tion, occurring in the letter to her nephew which we 
have already quoted, and in which she contrasts his 
" strong, manly, vigorous sketches, full of variety and 
glow " with her own performance on the " little bit, 
two inches wide, of ivory, on which I work with so 
fine a brush as produces little effect after much 
labor." 1 

It is the business of a discriminating criticism to 
distinguish between positive faults and those nega- 
tions which are incidental to a given manner. A 
negation is not a fault. We ought not to expect 
large treatments and big canvases of a genius whose 
forte is evidently the " two inches wide of ivory." 
If we have a proper sense of proportion, the " effect " 
will not be " little " because physically small, but will 
be as large, in relation to its medium, as one of the 
wall-covering pictures of Benjamin West. 

The negations must be pointed out, however, for 
no one's place in history is fully comprehended until 
the omissions as well as the commissions are under- 
stood. Let us take the two together. 

Much of the failure to properly measure Miss 
Austen's work is due to a misapprehension of the 

1 Austen-Leigh, p. 310. 



Her Wonderful Charm 381 

nature of a miniature. It is not so much a question 
of reduced scale as it is of fineness of execution. 
The space is hmited, of necessity; and not to wander 
outside the confines requires a delicate self-restraint 
which, constantly applied, is likely to interfere with 
enthusiasm : and as enthusiasm, in youth at least, is 
apt to destroy perspective, the restraint has — with 
whatever regrettable losses may flow from the check- 
ing — a strong tendency to heighten the value of 
the art. 

" Three or four families in a country village is the 
very thing to work on," Miss Austen says, in one of 
her charming letters of advice.^ This, as we know, 
was her own method, from which she never varied. 
She did not "create " eccentric characters, like SmoUet 
and Dickens ; there are no Lismahagos nor Mrs. 
Havishams in her books, but only the every-day 
people of an English community. Her work is imme- 
diately recognized as typical ; and one feels that Mr. 
Elton stands for numerous clergymen whose spiritual 
descendants may be found to this day in every dio- 
cese. In the Quarterly article above referred to, 
Scott points out that the nature imitated by the 
former novelists " was, as the French say, la belle 
natjire," involving an exaggerated sentimentalism. 
" He who paints from le beait, ideal," concludes Sir 
Walter, " if his scenes and sentiments are striking and 
interesting, is in a great measure exempted from 
the difficult task of reconciling them with the or- 
dinary probabilities of life ; but he who paints a 
scene of common occurrence places his composition 
within that extensive range of criticism which general 
experience offers to every reader." 

1 Brabourne, vol. ii., p. 312. 



382 Jane Austen 

But here the objection is offered that this confined 
view is too narrow. Madame de Stael, with her eyes 
on four nations, thinks this village study vnlgaire. 
Miss Bronte, not finding in her any reflection of her 
own spiritual unrest, deems her " only shrewd and 
observant." It is true that the age is partially respon- 
sible for negative shortcomings. The age makes the 
men; but the greatest men help to make the age. 
Miss Austen was not supereminently greater than her 
times, as the greatest writers have been ; but she was 
superior to her times, as all great writers are, — 
superior in her own peculiar field. 



II 

The brutal coarseness of the earlier years of the 
eighteenth century had been only partially bettered 
in Miss Austen's time, and the finer ideals following 
the transition had not yet taken full possession of 
many minds. It was still a day when the recollections 
of a Lawrence Sterne in the pulpit — in two pulpits, 
in fact — could be regarded with amused indifference, 
but not yet a day which could have understood the 
earnestness of a Charles Kingsley.-^ It was a day 
when religious observance was so rare that Admiral 
Francis Austen was referred to as " the officer who 

^ There could be no stronger contrast between that day and this 
than the fact that the drawing-room in which ' Emma ' and ' Persua- 
sion ' were written is now the reading-room of a laborers' club. The idea 
still prevailed — Cowper's idea, Goldsmith's idea — that if God made 
the country and man made the town, the place for good men, and 
especially " men of God," was the country, — a very comfortable, 
snug idea indeed, and one that saved the clergy a vast deal of 
trouble. 



Her Wonderful Charm 383 

kneeled at church ; " ^ when mothers corrected their 
daughters by reading to them extracts from the 
' Mirror,' and the favorite gospel was that according 
to Henry Mackenzie. It was also a day when livings 
were bought by the highest bidder, Miss Austen's 
father having had one of his bought for him by an 
uncle, and another given him by a cousin ; ^ and a 
day when the utmost worldliness controlled all grades 
of the clergy. The awakening of the English con- 
science was of a very slow growth. Mr. Russell tells 
how the proposal of certain clergymen to improve 
themselves in their profession was met by a brother 
priest: "When the neighboring parsons first tried to 
get up a periodical clerical meeting for the study of 
theology, he responded genially to the suggestion, 
' Oh, yes, I think it sounds a capital thing, and I sup- 
pose we shall finish up with a rubber and a bit of 
supper.'"^ If there were not so many "squires in 
orders " as formerly, the bishop was still a prince, 
travelling in a coach and six, with his wife and daugh- 
ters following in a humbler carriage, to mark the dis- 
tinction between an apostle and his female connections. 
It was the day of the " Greek play bishops," — some- 
times "all Greek and greediness," like Parson Lingon's. 
Even Sydney Smith, who could be witty at the ex- 
pense of missionary efforts, finds the indifference of 
an Archbishop of Canterbury too much for him : " A 
proxy to vote, if you please, a proxy to consent to 
arrangement of estates if wanted ; but a proxy sent 
down in a Canterbury fly to take the Creator to wit- 

^ Aiisten-Leigh, p. 185. 
2 lb., p. 176. 

^ ' Collections and Recollections.' By one who has kept a Diary. 
Harper & Bros., New York and London, 1898, p. 63. 



384 J^^^ Austell 

ness that the Archbishop, detained in town by busi- 
ness or pleasure, will never violate that foundation of 
piety over which he presides — all this seems to me 
an act of the most extraordinary indolence ever 
recorded in history." ^ 

It was an age of utilitarianism. Johnson's voice 
was still the most powerful in the land, although 
Johnson himself was dead. The doctor belonged to 
the old school, and had no affiliations with the new and 
brighter sympathies just dawning into life. He was 
the prose Pope, and he was the pope of prose, making 
of the Rambler a heavy supplement to the Spectator. 

Yet religion was not quite dead, and a deeper note 
than the purely utilitarian was being occasionally 
struck. As early as 1739 the first foundling, and in 
1769 the first Magdalen, hospital were founded. Law's 
' Serious Call' had done its work, and John Wesley 
was embarked on his great enterprise. During Jane 
Austen's lifetime, the first Factory Act was passed, 
remedying the terrible evils of child-labor ; and par- 
liamentary inquiry into the state of the prisons had, 
many years previously, prepared the way for Howard's 
magnificent crusade. The first Sunday-school was 
started four years before her birth. 

And as a renewed earnestness in religion is, if it be 
of the vital quality, always accompanied by philan- 
thropic efi"ort, so also, in such a day may be looked 
for a renascence of commercial glory and a fresh 
spring of poetic inspiration. This was the day which 
saw the introduction of the spinning-jenny and the 
elevation of British pottery to the dignity of a fine 
art. In 1785 Pitt reckoned the number of persons 
engaged in England in cotton manufacture at eighty 

1 ' Collections and Recollections,' p 60. 



Her Wonderful Charm 385 

thousand ; and in the same year we have Wedgvvorth's 
statement that between fifteen and twenty thousand 
workmen were employed in his potteries. The brain 
of James Watt was big with the birth of steam, and 
there were aheady several hundred miles of navigable 
canals in England. 

The nature of beauty was beginning to be under- 
stood once more ; and the search of it for its own 
sake, and for the revelations back of it, was slowly 
substituting for the didactic and polished artifice of 
Pope a kindling passion for the absolute and the veri- 
table. Beauty passed from her service as a hand- 
maid to her kingdom as a queen. We hear the first 
notes of it in Cowper and Burns, although there is a 
presage of the dawn in Gray and Thomson. The 
greatest poets of the last one hundred years were 
contemporaries of Jane Austen: ' Tam O'Shanter* 
was published in 1793 ; the first two cantos of 
* Childe Harold ' were published five years before ; the 
' Revolt of Islam,' the year of, and ' Endymion,' the 
year after, her death. This seizure 6jy beauty, taking 
the place of the artificial employment pf beauty, ran 
to its extremest length in Shelley, who fled from it as 
a thing which one could not gaze upon and live, and in 
Keats, who, crying " Beauty is truth," looked into its 
face and died ; and this idea of subjection, not by 
arbitrary choice, but of natural necessity, still throbs 
in modern poetry, one of whose followers has thus 
expressed and defended it : 

The eternal slaves of beauty 
Are the masters of the world. 

And the fuller and saner music of Wordsworth, 
gathering into itself the deep meaning of a life irra- 

25 



386 Jane Austen 

diated with intimations from " before and after," 
gently impressed the new Idea into a loving com- 
panionship with the poet who, in that he was not 
driven mad by it, was its master, and yet a beauty 
which, in that he did not toy with it, was his queen. 
It could have been said of Cowper and Crabbe — and 
therefore it could not have been said by them — 

A primrose by the river's brim 
A yellow primrose was to him 
And it was nothing more. 



Ill 

Now, if Jane Austen had reflected the larger im- 
pulses whose faint stirrings were beginning to be 
heard, she would not to-day be praised for the quali- 
ties which got their excellence from this denial. It 
was not from any sympathy with the poor that she 
admired Crabbe and playfully said she could fancy 
herself his wife; it was doubtless because of her 
pleasure in his orderly sense of observation. Not 
much of this newness found its way into her life. As 
she knew it, and as most of the people around her 
knew it, it was still a complacent age which had 
not begun to question itself very seriously; still the 
age of the copy-book maxim that the proper study 
of mankind is man ; and because this study was of 
Man in the abstract, and not of men as brethren of 
one compassionable family, it was still artificial and 
ornamental. And yet within her sphere she rose 
superior to the artifice, being the first to escape from 
affectation without offering a brutal frankness in its 
stead. She became the pioneer of refined natural- 



Her Wonderful Charm 387 

ness in fiction, neither Richardson, nor Fielding, nor 
Miss Burney, having attained that honor, and Miss 
Edgeworth failing to accomplish it with charm. 

Hers is a true microcosm because it perfectly re- 
flects her macrocosm, albeit the " three or four 
families " comprise it. She does not passionately iden- 
tify herself with any of her characters ; none of her 
books is written in the first person, and, nervously 
apprehensive of its possible absurdities, she is careful 
to avoid Richardson's and Miss Burney's error of put- 
ting the narrative into the form of correspondence.^ 
On the contrary, Miss Austen is an amused looker-on 
in Vienna, not personally concerned, and not looking 
on as a student. Had Charlotte Bronte written 
* Mansfield Park,' Fanny's story would have been 
conceived in an atmosphere of rebellion. Julia 
Bertram would have become Miss Ingram, and the 
little dependant would have suffered from her cousins 
what Jane Eyre suffered from the Reeds. Miss 
Austen, to be sure, makes us feel her pity for Fanny, 
and sufficiently identifies her moral support with her 
heroine's actions ; but it is wholly impersonal, and 
with all the drawbacks to Fanny's happiness at 
Mansfield Park, the reader sees that she is happier 
there than she would be in any other place.^ George 
Eliot would have been tempted to force Fanny back 

^ Mr. Villars must have devoted all his waking hours to the reading 
of Evelina's letters, and the consumption of time in writing such 
voluminous epistles would have left no time for the events they 
chronicle. 

2 Governesses, with Miss Austen, are not necessarily unhappy. 
Miss Taylor's position was an enviable one ; and while there is criti- 
cism of the method of hiring them in ' Emma,' the despairing attitude 
of Miss Fairfax is almost wholly due to her unfulfilled engagement 
with Frank Churchill. 



388 Jane Austen 

to her father's disreputable home on the plea of 
family duty and social helpfulness ; and her unhappi- 
ness in that great author's hands would have been in 
the struggle between taste and duty. Miss Austen's 
viewpoint was not harassed by the pressure of al- 
truistic ethics, and thus avoided the initial errors to 
which authors suffering under their too urgent claims 
are liable — errors of unnecessary sacrifice, and errors, 
therefore, on the artistic side, against taste. Miss 
Bronte's indignation frequently stands in the way of 
her humor, which, indeed, is her chief defect. We 
have seen that Tennyson ranks Miss Austen with 
Shakspere, and others have not stumbled at this 
bold assertion. Shakspere was pre-eminently great 
in three things : range, depth, and impersonal detach- 
ment; and the comparison undoubtedly refers only 
to this last quality, for in that she was certainly more 
Shaksperean than either Charlotte Bronte or George 
Eliot. That necessitates humor; and the laughter 
which springs from such a humor was absent in 
Currer Bell. George Eliot's superiority, in general, 
to both is her combination of the strong imagination 
of the one with the fine flow of humor of the other, 
except when her kinship of loving feeling with some 
great idea confused the imagination and obstructed 
the humor. The faults of each were faults of great- 
ness ; and Miss Austen, though more Shaksperean in 
her impersonal freedom, was less great because of 
this excellence than they. 

The outside world does not press, nor the inside 
passion. The sanest genius knows its limitations and 
does not transgress them. It is not that each char- 
acter is an end in itself; she had a well-defined moral 
scheme, and one has only to remember the contrasted 



Her Wonderful Charm 389 

sisters in ' Sense and Sensibility ' to understand how- 
thoughtless selfishness is played against considerate 
self-abnegation in her novels. Marianne expresses 
astonishment that Elinor should have known of Ed- 
ward's secret engagement to Lucy for four months 
and kept silent. " Four months ! and yet you loved 
him ! " "Yes, but I did not love only him." If she 
was ever tempted — but, of course, she never was — 
to lengthen the links of the chain beyond the indi- 
vidual family to the big social family outside, she was 
wise to decline the invitation ; for what was a mission 
wdth George Eliot would have been only an experi- 
mental tour de force with Jane Austen. 

Hence we should not regret her " limited " view, as 
it is all the more perfect for that reason. If there is 
no attempt to reach beyond one's range, it is not a 
defect to be " defective" in range. She never at- 
tempted what she was unable to perform ; and the 
French critic, looking across the Channel at the 
amazing precocities of children in English fiction, 
could not possibly include Jane Austen in his aston- 
ishment: " C'est seulement en pays protestant que 
vous trouverez un roman employe tout entier a 
decrire le progres du sentiment moral dans une 
enfant de douze ans." ^ 



IV 

A miniaturist, with the definite object of a por- 
trait before him, has, by reason of his reduced scale, 
no room for extraneous matter. Character must be 

1 ' Histoire de la Litterature Anglaise.' Par H. Taine, Paris : 
Libraire Hachette et Cie, 1895. Tome iv., p. 474. 



390 J^rie Austen 

emphasized without outside help. In no other style 
of work is nicety of expression, is delicacy of detail, 
so necessary ; and, consequently, is the least failure 
so noticeable. There are many world-famous pic- 
tures of the heroic size which have for centuries 
ranked among the wonders of the world, but which, 
in certain minute details, may be subjected to un- 
favorable criticism: the grandeur of the general exe- 
cution smothers the faults in the largeness of the 
canvas. But in the " exquisite touch," there is no 
escape in size, and a minor instantly becomes a 
major fault. Miss Austen almost never erred in this 
essential. There is, in the first place, no padding in 
her stories ; there are no superfluous characters. One 
might say that there is a sister or two too many in some 
of the novels, but further consideration clearly shows a 
reason for each. Even Mary Bennet is necessary as 
an offset to the others, her pedantic nonsense adding 
an extra touch of comedy to the situation and height- 
ening the contrast between the numerous kinds of 
foolishness that may exist in any one family. In this 
particular family, Mary is one of the vehicles of Mr. 
Bennet's irony, and thus indirectly the means of 
expressing the author's satire, for in * Pride and 
Prejudice ' the author speaks chiefly through Mr. 
Bennet and Elizabeth. 

"What say you, Mary? for you are a young lady of 
deep reflection, I know, and read great books and make 
extracts." 

They are discussing Mr. Darcy's behavior at the ball. 
Miss Lucas defends that particular instance of" pride." 
" I could easily forgive his pride," says the injured 
Elizabeth, " if he had not mortified mine." 



Her Wonderful Charm 391 

" Pride," observed Mary, who piqued herself upon the 
solidity of her reflections, " is a very common failing, I 
believe. By all that I have ever read, I am convinced that 
it is very common indeed ; that human nature is particularly 
prone to it, and that there are very few of us who do not 
cherish a feeling of self-complacency on the score of some 
quality or other, real or imaginary. Vanity and pride are 
different things, though the words are often used synony- 
mously. A person may be proud without being vain. 
Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to 
what we would have others think of us." 

And so we are prepared for the characteristic 
opinions of the members of the home circle over Mr. 
Collins' remarkable letter announcing his coming, in 
which he speaks of himself as — 

"... so fortunate as to be distinguished by the patronage 
of the Right Honorable Lady Catherine de Bourgh, widow 
of Sir Louis de Bourgh, whose bounty and beneficence has 
preferred me to the valuable rectory of this parish, where it 
shall be my earnest endeavor to demean myself with grate- 
ful respect towards her ladyship, and be ever ready to per- 
form those rites and ceremonies which are instituted by the 
Church of England. As a clergyman, moreover, I feel it 
n)y duty to promote and establish the blessing of peace in 
all families within the reach of my influence ; and on these 
grounds I flatter myself that my present overtures of good 
will are highly commendable, and that the circumstance 
of my being next in the entail of Longbourne estate will be 
Icindly overlooked on your side, and not lead you to reject 
the offered olive-branch. ... If you should have no objec- 
tion to receive me into your house, I propose myself the 
satisfaction of waiting on you and your family, Monday, 
November i8th, by four o'clock, and shall probably trespass 



392 J^iie Austen 

upon your hospitality till the Saturday se' nnight following, 
which I can do without any inconvenience, as Lady Cathe- 
rine is far from objecting to my occasional absence on a 
Sunday, provided that some other clergyman is engaged to 
do the duty of the day. ..." 

Mr. Bennet chuckles over the possibilities of a fresh 
field of amusement in this visit. " Can he be a 
sensible man, sir?" asks Elizabeth. 

" No, my dear, I think not. I have great hopes of find- 
ing him quite the reverse. There is a mixture of servility 
and self-importance in his letter which promises well. I 
am impatient to see him." 

Elizabeth is " chiefly struck with the extraordinary 
deference for Lady Catherine " on the part of Mr. 
Collins, and with " his kind intention of christening, 
marrying and burying, his parishioners whenever it 
were required." Catherine and Lydia are not inter- 
ested, since for several weeks they " had received 
pleasure from the society" of no man who did not 
appear in a scarlet coat. 

" In point of composition," said Mary, " his letter does 
not seem defective. The idea of the olive-branch perhaps 
is not wholly new, yet I think it is well-expressed." 

We surely could not spare Mary Bennet. 



V 

Her sense of humor kept her safely within these 
narrow confines. No one ever abided by the knowl- 
edge of his limitations more consistently than did 
Miss Austen. To the egregious Mr. Clarke's sug- 
gestion that she should attempt the delineation of a 



Her Wonderful Charm 393 

clergyman like Beattie's minstrel, she very sensibly 
replies that it is quite beyond her powers. " A clas- 
sical education, or at any rate a very extensive 
acquaintance with English literature ancient and 
modern appears to me quite indispensable for the 
person who would do any justice to your clergyman ; 
and I think I may safely boast myself to be, with all 
possible vanity, the most unlearned and uninformed 
female who ever dared to be an authoress." ^ The ir- 
repressible secretary to H. R. H, then proposes " an 
historical romance illustrative of the august house of 
Coburg," that gentleman having just been appointed 
to a chaplaincy in that house. " But I could no more 
write a romance than an epic poem," she says. " I 
could not sit seriously down to write a serious 
romance under any other motive than to save my 
life; and if it were indispensable for me to keep it up 
and never relax into laughing at myself or at other 
people, I am sure I should be hung before I had 
finished the first chapter." ^ 

This power of self-restraint, revealing in such a 
very unusual degree a perception of boundaries, 
assures one almost in advance that, within the boun- 
daries, the work is also critically excellent. We have 
a right to look for chastened expression, for a 
holding in check of all exaggerations, for a sweet 
intuitive understanding of proportions. Miss Austen 
is the pre-eminent mistress of taste. If order is 
heaven's first law, this lady must rank among the 
hierarchs of art, for in no other author is to be found 
a nicer perception of congruous beauty and a keener 
discernment of symmetry. 

1 Austen-Leigh, p. 270. 

2 lb. p. 271. 



394 J^riG Austen 

And this is all the more remarkable in one whose 
extraordinary humorous perception would naturally 
lead her to caricature. Even her avowed burlesque 
on the romantic school is not exaggerated beyond 
the allowed limits, and she shows herself a true sister 
to Fielding in that her attitude towards her subject 
does not permit her to rest in satire, but compels her 
to create a positive interest in the characters aside 
from the types they are intended to ridicule. 
' Northanger Abbey ' may be farcical comedy in 
places, but it is never mere farce. We have already 
contrasted Miss Austen with Miss Burney and Miss 
Edgeworth, in regard to this restraining excellence 
of taste. No other woman writer of her time had this 
gift in an equal degree. Miss Ferrier, for example, 
must be grouped with Smollett and Dickens as a 
farce — or broadly comic, rather than with Jane 
Austen as a high-comedy, author; as may be seen 
by a comparison of her Dr. Redgill with Mr. Collins. 
There is the constant danger of unwarranted exag- 
geration in caricature, which is what makes the 
comic papers so frequently unjust. Caricature is al- 
most always exaggeration ; yet Miss Austen could 
burlesque with such delicate art as to avoid its 
objectionable qualities. She knows how to amus- 
ingly emphasize a foible without amplifications beyond 
the range of human probability, — a power not gen- 
erally exercised by Dickens, whose Mrs. Nickleby, 
for this reason, is not nearly so convincing as Jane's 
Miss Bates.i 

^ The temptation of a too farcical portrayal is well shown is some 
of the pictures in the illustrated editions of Miss Austen's novels. 
Mr. Brock makes Mrs. Bennet look a little too like Mrs. Gamp to 
completely satisfy our idea of that lady, who doubtless looked wise 



Her Wonderful Charm 395 

Miss Austen reverts to nature. The tendency of 
romance towards the grand style is always a reflection 
of the overweening artificiality of the age. In the 
absence of true standards, the attempt at the lofty 
results in the top-lofty, and instead of the heroic we 
get the stilted. The consequent absurdities awaken 
the comic geniuses, who become the saviors of art 
through the medium of ridicule; and — to let the 
greatest of them stand for all — Cervantes grows into 
a caricaturist because what he is satirizing is itself a 
caricature of nature. The outrage done on nature is 
avenged by nature through him. Fielding and Miss 
Austen are, each in his and her individual way, fol- 
lowers in this path, — the latter perhaps uncon- 
sciously; and what the author of 'Joseph Andrews' 
accomplishes with masculine coarseness, the creator 
of 'Northanger Abbey 'brings about with refinement 
and taste. She is a humorist on the hither side of 
Caricature. " Taste " controls her, as much as " suit " 
controls Miss Bronte, and is the chief reason of the 
latter's dislike. 

On each side there was much to attract, and their ac- 
quaintance so promised as early an intimacy as good man- 
ners would warrant. 

The three charges she brings against Mr. Price's 
home are that it is the " abode of noise, disorder, and 
impropriety." It is not the moral unfitness of the 
home which disturbs her so much as the unseemli- 

enough, though she talked so foolishly. One expects exaggerations 
in illustrations to Dickens, to match the exaggerations in the text. 
Not so with Miss Austen, and we would probably have as deep a 
quarrel with any picture of Elizabeth as we would have over any 
picture of Rosalind. 



39^ Jane Austen 

ness of the impropriety, which is simply the outcome 
of the noise and the disorder; and she contrasts 
these with the " elegance, propriety, regularity, har- 
mony " of Mansfield Park. Fanny shrinks from in- 
troducing her father to Mr. Crawford. 

He must be ashamed and disgusted altogether. He 
must soon give her up, and cease to have the smallest 
inclination for the match ; and yet, though she had been 
so much wanting his affection to be cured, this was a sort of 
cure that would be almost as bad as the complaint ; and I 
believe there is scarcely a young lady in the United King- 
doms who would not rather put up with the misfortune of 
being sought by a clever, agreeable man, than have him 
driven away by the vulgarity of her nearest relatives. 

It would almost seem that " by taste ye are saved " 
is her sufficient gospel. It is, as we have seen, the 
keynote of her disapproval of the Spectator. Through 
this orderly sense she chiefly regards nature. 

Her pleasure in the walk must arise from the exercise and 
the day, from the view of the last smiles of the year upon 
the tawny leaves and withered hedges, and from repeating 
to herself some few of the thousand poetical descriptions 
extant of autumn, that season of peculiar and inexhaustible 
influence on the mind of taste and tenderness, that season 
which has drawn from every poet worthy of being read 
some attempt to description or some lines of feeling. 

VI 

There were, indeed, no artists of scenery in her 
day; that is a more recent development. Miss Bur- 
ney never describes it. Mrs. Radcliffe's highly wrought 
pictures are too fantastic to be called representations. 



Her Wonderful Charm 397 

Take the following instances at random from two well- 
known living writers, to exemplify the modern fond- 
ness for emphasizing the illustrative value of nature in 
the scheme of the design : 

It was four o'clock in the afternoon, and the hottest hour 
of the day on that Sierran foothill. The western sun stream- 
ing down the mile-long slope of close-set pine crests, had been 
caught on an outlying ledge of glaring white quartz, covered 
with mineral tools and debris, and seemed to have been 
thrown into an incandescent rage. The air above it shim- 
mered and became visible. A white canvas tent on it was 
an object not to be borne ; the steel-tipped picks and shovels, 
intolerable to touch and eyesight, and a tilted tin prospect- 
ing pan, falling over, flashed out as another sun of insuffer- 
able effulgence. 

It was autumn, but the morning was of June. In the park 
beyond the ha-ha the deer lay laagered, twitching fly-infested 
ears. On the rail fencing the lawn from the main road, a 
dozen feet below, a belated fly-catcher sat and looked over 
the brooding vale. Far away a church spire pricked up 
against the blue ; and through the still noon the stertorous 
breathing of a little pompous engine travelled noisily. 

The eighteenth-century view was entirely different. 
Instead of a particularized picture, it contents itself 
with references to the " animated charms " of nature. 
The poets of Miss Austen's time had not yet im- 
pressed upon the prose writers the idea of its kinship 
with man's personal longings and griefs. Here again 
Miss Austen does not rise above her age. It is not 
enough to say that her theory of art forbade the inter- 
ruption of her tale with descriptions of scenery. She is 
not a poetic artist; and a real absence of that passion 



398 J^i^c Austen 

for nature which is usually linked with a consuming 
personal attachment — regarding her as the soothing 
mother, or finding similarities between her insensibil- 
ity and the cruelties of forsaking love — this real ab- 
sence is the dominant cause of her emotionless atti- 
tude ; for a real presence would have transformed her 
theory into an acceptance of nature as we see her 
portrayed in the later literature. The love of woods 
and seas is too real an emotion for any theory of art 
to restrain. 

Miss Austen had an appreciation for scenery; she 
had an eighteenth-century regard, rather than a nine- 
teenth-century love, for beauty. Her environment 
contributed its subduing influences, for the chalk hills 
of North Hants are not picturesque, and a country 
where the " chief beauty" is confessedly the " hedge- 
rows " is a country where the beauty is confined. 
And the girl who had no keen personal disappoint- 
ments to find reflecting images for in nature would 
doubtless have preferred the orderly slopes of her 
native downs to the disturbing grandeur of the Alps. 

Her descriptions are never specific. A line of clifis 
is simply " beautiful." Different kinds of trees in 
Lyme are referred to as " the woody varieties." The 
rocks are " romantic." Spring's progress is the " prog- 
ress of vegetation." A bank is of " considerable 
abruptness and grandeur." The idea of comfort — 
Cowper's idea — is dominant. The beauty of the 
situation of Mr. Knightley's farm is apparently felt, 
but what is emphasized is that it is " favorably placed 
and sheltered ; " and the river " makes a close and 
handsome curve around it." Scenery is still an orna- 
ment. She regrets the loss of the " highly valued " 
elms because they " gave such an ornament " to Hall's 



Her Wonderful Charm 399 

meadow.^ She is not awed so much as frankly dis- 
tressed by thunder storms. "We sat upstairs and 
had thunder and Hghtning, as usual," she writes, as if 
they were a dessert; and she thinks herself fortunate 
that her fears are " shared by the mistress of the house, 
as that procured blinds and candles." ^ As typical 
an example as any of her descriptions of scenery is 
that of the view at Fonwell : 

It was a sweet view — sweet to the eye and mind. Eng- 
lish verdure, English culture, English comfort, seen under a 
sun bright without being oppressive. 

Now, these things are set down without the least 
feeling of regret. She would not have been the Jane 
Austen of our regard otherwise. The denials of 
nature, it is true, prevent the fullest development, but 
they may heighten the excellences which exist. And 
so far as the mere absence of nature worship is con- 
cerned in this lady's work, that is not so important in 
itself as is its contributive value to the general 
characteristics we are considering. If it suggests 
primness, it also hints at a proper restraint and self- 
knowledge of limitations. If it seems cold, it at least 
commends itself to our judgment as wholly without 
artificiality. If it does not show an ardent affection 
for nature, even so it is a return to that very nature 
in its lack of ostentation and in its clear-eyed honesty. 
Moreover, nobody looks for landscape gardening in a 
miniature, and we should never forget that the chief 
business of a novelist is to portray character. There 
is really no room for scenery in Miss Austen's scheme. 
" It was a beautiful evening, mild and still, and the 

1 Austen-Leigh, p. 232. 

2 Brabourne, vol. ii., p. 103. 



400 Jane Austen 

drive was as pleasant as the serenity of nature could 
make it." That is enough. The party was returning 
from Southerton after an unsatisfactory day; and the 
reader is too much occupied with the comedy to care 
for the scene in which it is placed. 

" Well, Fanny, this has been a fine day for you, upon my 
word ! " said Mrs. Norris, as they drove through the park. 
" Nothing but pleasure from beginning to end ! I am sure 
you ought to be very much obliged to your aunt Bertram 
and me for contriving to let you go. A pretty good day's 
amusement you have had ! " 

Maria was just discontented enough to say directly, " I 
think you have done pretty well yourself, ma'am. Your lap 
seems full of good things, and here is a basket of something 
between us which has been knocking my elbow unmercifully." 

" My dear, it is only a beautiful little heath which that nice 
old gardener would make me take ; but if it is in your way 
I will have it in my lap directly. There, Fanny, you shall 
carry that parcel for me — take great care of it — do not let 
it fall ; it is a cream cheese, just like the excellent one we had 
at dinner. Nothing would satisfy that good old Mrs. 
Whitaker but my taking one of the cheeses. I stood out as 
long as I could, till the tears almost came into her eyes, and 
I knew that it was just the sort that my sister would be de- 
lighted with. That Mrs. Whitaker is a treasure ! She was 
quite shocked when I asked her whether wine was allowed at 
the second table, and she has turned away two housemaids 
for wearing white gowns. Take care of the cheese, Fanny. 
Now I can manage the other parcel and the basket very 
well." 

"What else have you been sponging?" said Maria, half 
pleased that Southerton should be so complimented. 

" Sponging, my dear ! It is nothing but four of those 
beautiful pheasants' eggs, which Mrs. Whitaker would quite 



Her Wonderful Charm 401 

force upon me ; she would not take a denial. She said it must 
be such an amusement to me, as she understood I lived quite 
alone, to have a few living creatures of that sort ; and so to 
be sure it will. I shall get the dairymaid to set them under 
the first spare hen, and if they come to good I can have them 
moved to my own house and borrow a coop ; and it will be 
a great delight to me in my lonely hours to attend to them. 
And if I have good luck, your mother shall have some." 

It was a beautiful evening, mild and still, and the drive was 
as pleasant as the serenity of nature could make it ; but when 
Mrs. Norris ceased speaking it was altogether a silent drive 
to those within. Their spirits were in general exhausted ; 
and to determine whether the day had afforded most plea- 
sure or pain might occupy the meditations of almost all. 



VII 

Taste, however, with Miss Austen, does not halt at 
the mere conformities of behavior. The faculty of 
discerning order is with her the power of relishing 
mental and moral excellence ; the elegance is of the 
spirit. Her chosen field is comedy, — high comedy. 
Her stories are, I think, the most delicately amusing ever 
written. There is no storm and stress ; we do not go to 
them for the solution of old problems, or to have our 
sympathies awakened towards new ones. There is 
not a death in all her fiction. There is no broad 
brush work ; she never draws a servant. It is the 
ironies of life she has to deal with, and she faces them 
with their own mirror; — the ironies, too, of the life 
she was familiar with, which was the genteel life. 
With a keen eye she observed the frailties and follies 
of the world about her. That lay-confessor of ladies' 
maids, Samuel Richardson, took much pride in his 

26 



402 J^i^^ Austen 

" rules of conduct." Miss Austen turns her laughing 
eyes that way. 

If it be true, as a celebrated author has maintained, that 
no young lady can be justified in falling in love before the 
gentleman's love is declared, it must be very improper that 
a young lady should dream of a gentleman before the gen- 
tleman is first known to have dreamt of her. 

I trust it will not be considered ungallant to call 
attention to one of the engaging foibles of the gentler 
sex, as portrayed by one of its most entertaining 
representatives : 

Mrs. Allen cannot boast similar triumphs when 
Mrs. Thorpe expatiates on the talents of her sons 
and the beauty of her daughters, but she consoles 
herself with the discovery " that the lace on Mrs. 
Thorpe's pelisse was not half so handsome as that 
on her own." 

She had found some acquaintances ; had been so lucky, 
too, as to find in them the family of a most worthy old 
friend ; and, as the completion of good fortune, had found 
these friends by no means so expensively dressed as herself. 

This is the Mrs. Allen who was 

. . . never satisfied with the day unless she spent the 
chief of it by the side of Mrs. Thorpe in what they called 
conversation. 

She understood the evanescent quality of girl- 
friendships : 

. . . overtook the second Miss Thorpe as she was loiter- 
ing towards Edgar's Buildings between two of the sweetest 
girls in the world, who had been her dear friends all the 
morning. 



Her Wonderful Charm 403 

* Northanger Abbey' being a skit at the 'Mys- 
teries of Udolpho,' no opportunity is lost to poke 
fun at its romanticism. Concerning the room of 
the late Mrs. Tilney: 

" It remains as it was, I suppose? " said she in a tone of 
feeling. 

"Yes, entirely." 

" And how long ago may it be that your mother died? " 

"She has been dead these nine years." And nine years, 
Catherine knew, was a trifle of time compared with what 
generally elapsed after the death of an injured wife, before 
her room was put to rights. 

The Tilneys called for her at the appointed time, and no 
new difficulty arising, no sudden recollection, no unexpected 
summons, no impertinent intrusions to disconcert their 
measures, my heroine was most unnaturally able to fulfil her 
engagement, though it was made with the hero himself. 

This gentle intrusion of common-sense into an 
artificial sentimentalism, dissolving the mists of un- 
reality into a clear atmosphere, is a new note in 
fiction, and is only equalled in subsequent success 
by Thackeray. Miss Austen's heroines, like that 
master's Charlotte, "went on eating bread and 
butter," to the disappointment of the devotees of 
"sensibility," who wanted them to be engaged in 
more exciting pursuits. 

And who that has read this book can ever forget 
the delightful chapter in which Catherine refers to 
" something very shocking " which " will soon come 
out in London," — " more horrible than anything we 
have met with yet," — "uncommonly dreadful. I 
shall expect murder and everything of the kind." 



404 ]^^^ Austen 

And Miss Tllney, misunderstanding her, hopes that 
the account is exaggerated, and that " if such a design 
is known beforehand, proper measures will be taken 
by government to prevent its coming to effect." 
Then Henry, perceiving the error, has sport at the 
expense of each. " Miss Morland, do not mind 
what he says ; but have the goodness to satisfy me 
as to this dreadful riot." "Riot! — what riot?" 

" My dear Eleanor, the riot is only in your own brain. 
The confusion there is scandalous. Miss Morland has been 
talking of nothing more dreadful than a new publication 
which is shortly to come out, in three duodecimo volumes, 
two hundred and seventy-six pages in each, with a frontis- 
piece to the first of two tombstones and a lantern — do you 
understand? And you, Miss Morland, — my stupid sister 
has mistaken all your clearest expressions. You talked of 
expected horrors in London ; and instead of instantly con- 
ceiving, as any rational creature would have done, that such 
words could relate only to a circulating library, she imme- 
diately pictured to herself a mob of three thousand men 
assembled in St. George's fields, the Bank attacked, the 
Tower threatened, the streets of London flowing with blood, a 
detachment of the Twelfth Light Dragoons (the hopes of the 
nation) called up from Northampton to quell the insurgents, 
and the gallant Captain Frederick Tilney, in the moment of 
charging at the head of his troop, knocked off his horse by 
a brick-bat from an upper window. Forgive her stupidity. 
The fears of the sister have added to the weakness of the 
woman ; but she is by no means a simpleton in general." 

Miss Tilney then insists that her brother should 
explain his persiflage to the innocent Catherine. 
"What am I to do?" "You know what you 
ought to do. Clear your conduct handsomely be- 



Her Wonderful Charm 405 

fore her. Tell her that you think very highly of the 
understanding of women." 

" Miss Morland, I think very highly of the understanding 
of all the women in the world, especially of those, whoever 
they may be, with whom I happen to be in company." 

" That is not enough. Be more serious." 

" Miss Morland, no one can think more highly of the 
understanding of women than I do. In my opinion, nature 
has given them so much that they never find it necessary to 
use more than half." 

The romantic folly of over-sensibility is a favorite 
subject of satire with Miss Austen: 

Marianne would have thought herself very inexcusable 
had she been able to sleep at all the first night after 
parting from Willoughby. She would have been ashamed 
to look her family in the face the next morning, had 
she not risen from her bed in more need of repose 
than when she lay down in it. 

''Well, Marianne," said Elinor, as soon as he had left 
them, " for one morning I think you have done pretty 
well. You have already ascertained Mr. Willoughby's 
opinion in almost every matter of importance. You know 
what he thinks of Cowper and Scott ; you are certain of 
his estimating their beauties as he ought, and you have 
received every assurance of his admiring Pope no more 
than is proper. But how is your acquaintance to be long 
supported under such extraordinary despatch of every 
subject for discourse? You will soon have exhausted each 
favorite topic. Another meeting will suffice to explain 
his sentiments on picturesque beauty and second mar- 
riages, and then you can have nothing farther to ask." 



4o6 Jane Austen 

And the sentiments of a girl of seventeen towards a 
bachelor of thirty-five are thus set forth : 

She was perfectly disposed to make every allowance 
for the colonel's advanced state of life which humanity 
required. 

It is worthy of observation, too, that in all this quiet 
satire she includes herself whenever she feels her par- 
ticular likings liable to exaggeration. We know that 
Miss Austen was fond of Cowper ; ^ and she makes her 
most sentimental heroine rave over that author, as 
if to hold within check her own enthusiasm. The 
careful reader of ' Northanger Abbey ' sees that 
Miss Austen is frankly an admirer of Mrs. RadclifTe, 
notwithstanding her critical perception of her absurd- 
ities ; — that she shares with others who are not blind 
to the unrealities a live interest in the excitement of 
the plots. She is really laughing at herself, as well 
as at Catherine, all through the book. Like Theo- 
phrastus, she can say, " Dear blunderers, I am one 
of you." And this brings her back to the human 
touch, which sometimes she seems to avoid with 
her superior aloofness. 

She is equally satirical at the expense of the men, 
as the immortal Mr. Collins abundantly testifies. Of 
her baronet in ' Persuasion ' she says : 

He considered the blessing of beauty as inferior only to 
the blessing of a baronetcy ; and the Sir Walter Elliot who 
united these gifts was the constant object of his warmest 
respect and devotion. 

She readily finds a reason for Sir John Middleton's 
1 Austen-Leigh, p. 256. 



Her Wonderful Charm 407 

enthusiastic reception of the Dashwoods to his neigh- 
borhood : 

In settling a family of females only in his cottage, he had 
all the satisfaction of a sportsman ; for a sportsman, though 
he esteems only those of his sex who are sportsmen likewise, 
is not often desirous of encouraging their taste by admitting 
them to a residence within his own manor. 

When Wickman transfers his afifections to a young 
lady with the superior attraction of ;a^ 10,000, Eliza- 
beth Bennet writes to her aunt describing the dis- 
appointment of her younger sisters : 

" Kitty and Lydia take his defection much more to heart 
than I do. They are young in the ways of the world, and 
not yet open to the mortifying conviction that handsome 
young men must have something to live on, as well as the 
plain." 

In a mere snatch of dialogue, she sums up one of 
the principal charges against careless literary expres- 
sion : 

** I do not understand you." 

"Then we are on very unequal terms, for I understand 
you perfectly well." 

" Me ? yes ; I cannot speak well enough to be unintel- 
ligible." 

" Bravo ! an excellent satire on modern language." 

This Henry Tilney would probably be thought a 
little patronizing by a latter-day Catherine ; but 
Miss Austen puts into his mouth much of her own 
satire on the heavy didacticism of her time: 

" I am come, young ladies, in a very morahzing strain, 
to observe that our pleasures in this world are always to be 



4o8 J^ne Austen 

paid for, and that we often purchase them at a great disad- 
vantage, giving ready-monied actual happiness for a draught 
on the future that may not be honored." 

We are constantly surprised by the neat little 
" asides " she drops as her characters develop them- 
selves ; and this without the digressions which some- 
times arrest the interest of Thackeray's pages : 

Everybody at all addicted to letter-writing, without having 
much to say, which will include a large portion of the female 
world at least . . . 

She was heartily ashamed of her ignorance — a misplaced 
shame. Where people wish to attach, they should always 
be ignorant. To come with a well-informed mind is to 
come with an inability of administering to the vanity of 
others, which a sensible person would always wish to avoid. 
A woman, especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing 
anything, should conceal it as well as she can. 

Their vanity was in such good order that they seemed to 
be quite free from it, and gave themselves no airs ; while 
the praises attending such behavior. . . served to strengthen 
them in believing they had no faults. 

This brilliant characterization sometimes clarifies 
into the sharpness of a " saying ; " and it is to Miss 
Austen's great credit that the radical fault of the 
Maxim — that a great truth can seldom be folded 
in such narrow limits without sacrificing some parts 
of it — is avoided by her discriminating care, either 
by hedging her selections with a humorous perversity, 
as in — 

Selfishness must always be forgiven, you know, because 
there is no hope of a cure. 



Her Wonderful Charm 409 

When people are determined on a mode of conduct 
which they know to be wrong, they feel injured by the 
expectation of anything better from them. 

or by limiting the application by some saving verb 
or adverb, as in — 

A sanguine temper, though for ever expecting more good 
than occurs, does not always pay for its hopes by any pro- 
portionate depression. 

Goldsmith tells us that, when lovely woman stoops to 
folly, she has nothing to do but to die ; and when she 
stoops to be disagreeable, it is equally to be recommended 
as a clearer of ill-fame. 

Wickedness is always wickedness, but folly is not always 
folly. 

A mind lively and at ease can do with seeing nothing, 
and can see nothing that does not answer. 

One may be continually abusive without saying anything 
just ; but one cannot be always laughing at a man without 
now and then stumbling on something witty. 



VIII 

It is always the humorous view with Miss Austen, 
whether it be a neat crystallized characterization, or a 
chance laughing word dropped in passing, or a dry 
retort to some generality.^ 

1 Her letters are full of this humorous observation. In a letter to 
her nephew, she says : " We saw a countless number of postchaises 
full of boys pass by, yesterday morning, full of future heroes, legis- 
lators, fools, and villains." (Austen-Leigh, p. 307). There are other 
ways of reporting such events, but it was the " destiny which stands by 



410 J^i^c Austen 

" Younger sons cannot marry where they like." 
" Unless where they like women of fortune, which I think 
they very often do," 

Herein is observed her dramatic power. To many 
critical readers, the interest of her story is not so 
great as the interest in its narration, — in her way of 
telling the story. It is remarkable how little com- 
ment there is by the author: the characters develop 
themselves through the dialogue.^ Hers are not 
novels of incident, yet they are dramatic, — a singu- 
lar distinction. Not descriptive, eschewing the theat- 
rical, a quiet student of character, she is nevertheless 
more highly dramatic than most, in that she develops 
all her effects through the speech and actions of her 
characters. She combines the constructive abilities 
of Fielding — and without his improbability of situa- 
tion — with Richardson's consistency in piecing the 
parts into a harmonious whole. 

This dramatic use of the dialogue clearly manifests 
a thorough fundamental knowledge of her characters 
and a logical power in developing their peculiarities. 
We know Miss Thorpe sufficiently well towards the 
close of the novel to appreciate the effectiveness of 

sarcastic, with our dramatis personce folded in her hands," which ap- 
pealed to her dramatic sense. 

1 No better entertainment for a cultivated house party could be de- 
vised than the acting of certain typical scenes from Miss Austen's 
novels. This is put within the reach of the ambitious by Mrs. Dow- 
son's little book, ' Duologues and Scenes from the Novels of Jane 
Austen.' Arranged and adapted for drawing-room performance by 
Rosina Filippi [Mrs. Dowson]. With illustrations by Miss Fletcher. 
London : J. M. Dent & Co. 1895. ^^ scenery is necessary for the 
representations, as our author never depended upon that to heighten 
her effect ; and Miss Fletcher's illustrations give all the necessary 
hints for costumes. 



Her Wonderful Charm 411 

letting her seal her own fate with us out of her own 
lips (for out of our own mouths are we condemned). 
She is confessing her ardent affection for Captain 
Tilney : 

" He is the only man I ever did or could love, and I 
know you will convince him of it. The spring fashions are 
partly down, and the hats the most frightful you can 

imagine." 

Miss Bingley is allowed to rattle on, her creator grimly- 
standing by and shrugging her shoulders : 

" My ideas flow so rapidly that I have not time to ex- 
press them — by which means my letters convey no ideas 
at all to my correspondents." 

And however vacillating Mr. Bingley may be, one of 
the indications that he is not a fool is his reply to his 
sister's expressed desire to substitute conversation for 
dancing at a ball : 

" I should like balls infinitely better if they were car- 
ried on in a different manner. ... It surely would be much 
more rational if conversation instead of dancing made the 
order of the day." 

*' Much more rational, my dear Caroline, I dare say, but 
it would not be near so much like a ball." 

Mr. Collins, proposing to Elizabeth Bennet, declares 
that to fortune he is perfectly indifferent, and that he 
shall make no demand of that nature on her father, 
" since I am well aware that it would not be complied 
with." He is not disturbed by Elizabeth's rejection, but 
when she tells him that Lady Catherine would not 
approve of her, tJiat, he gravely confesses, would be 



4 1 2 Jane Austen 

an objection. It is a pity Elizabeth Bennet could not 
have stepped into Dorothea's place when Casaubon 
asked her to marry him: it would have prevented 
much subsequent trouble. 

" Her indifferent state of health unhappily prevents her 
being in town ; and by that means, as I told Lady Cath- 
erine myself one day, has deprived the British court of its 
brightest ornament. Her ladyship seemed pleased with the 
idea ; and you may imagine that I am happy on every occa- 
sion to offer those httle delicate compliments which are 
always acceptable to ladies. I have more than once ob- 
served to Lady Catherine that her charming daughter 
seemed bom to be a duchess, and that the most elevated 
rank, instead of giving her consequence, would be adorned 
by her. These are the kind of little things which please her 
ladyship and it is a sort of attention which I consider my- 
self peculiarly bound to pay." 

" You judge very properly," said Mr. Bennet, " and it is 
happy for you that you possess the talent of flattering with 
delicacy. May I ask whether these pleasing attentions 
proceed from the impulse of the moment, or are the result 
of previous study? " 

" They arise chiefly from what is passing at the time, 
and though I sometimes amuse myself with suggesting and 
arranging such little elegant compliments as may be adapted 
to ordinary occasions, I always wish to give them as unstud- 
ied an air as possible." 

The elegance of Miss Austen's disdain, and its 
entire freedom from malice ; her high ladyhood, 
with perhaps a touch of superciliousness, softened, 
however, by humor; the clear look of wondering 
contempt as she passes, and yet the lingering, amused 
at herself for her interest over some whimsical con- 



Her Wonderful Charm 413 

ceit; sane-eyed queen of serenity, and never harsh, 
even in the rare instances where she is indignant; not 
expecting overmuch from a self-deceiving human 
nature, yet with a feminine freedom from cynicism, 
and without the bitterness of a disappointed ideahty 
— where else shall we find a similar charm? 

When Mr. Collins could be forgotten, there was really a 
great air of comfort throughout, and by Charlotte's evident 
enjoyment of it, Elizabeth supposed he must be often 
forgotten. 

Elizabeth, referring to Bingley's inattention to others 
in his devotion to Jane, asks : " Is not general inciv- 
ility the very essence of love?" 



IX 

We are prepared for the full development of 
Mrs, Norris's character by the little sarcasms casually 
dropped in the early part of the story : 

. . . consoled herself for the loss of her husband by con- 
sidering that she could do very well without him ; and for 
her reduction of income by the evident necessity of stricter 
economy. 

. . . and no other attempt made at secrecy than Mrs. 
Norris's talking of it everywhere as a matter not to be 
talked of at present. 

And there is not a discordant note in the harmony of 
that lady's conduct throughout the book, all discor- 
dant, all out of harmony as that life is. It is a very 
great gift to be able to draw such a character without 
repelling the reader. Mrs. Norris is, in fact, a repul- 



414 J^^^ Austen 

sive creature. None of us would willingly live in the 
same house with her for twenty-four hours. Yet so 
great is the humor with which her selfishness is por- 
trayed, and so logical is the sequence of her develop- 
ment, that the very repulse becomes an impulse, and 
we confess ourselves eager for her reappearance when- 
ever she is absent from the stage. We don't feel that 
way about Mrs. Reed or Mr. Brocklehurst. I was 
reading 'Mansfield Park' aloud, the other evening, 
when one of the listeners, impatient at the description 
of the scenes at Portsmouth, cried out: "Skip all 
that, and give us some more of Mrs. Norris." Yet 
that young man would have been among the first 
to have fled from Mrs. Norris in the flesh. Mighty 
is humor ! 

The bores in Miss Austen's novels are all purposely 
so ; which is the precise opposite of most bores in 
fiction. Miss Burney did not intend to make Sir 
Clement Willoughby a bore, yet he is a most intoler- 
able specimen of that variety. In the notable article 
on our author by Archbishop Whately above referred 
to, Miss Austen is compared with Shakspere in her 
discriminating skill in drawing fools, — 

" a merit which is far from common. To invent, indeed, a 
conversation full of wisdom, or of wit, requires that the 
writer should himself possess ability ; but the converse does 
not hold good : it is no fool that can describe fools well, and 
many who have succeeded pretty well in painting superior 
characters have failed in giving individuality to those 
weaker ones which it is necessary to introduce in order to 
give a faithful representation of real life : they exhibit to us 
mere folly in the abstract, forgetting that to the eye of a 
skilful naturalist the insects on a leaf present as wide dif- 
ferences as exist between the elephant and the lion." 



Her Wonderful Charm 415 

To the complaint that her fools are too much like 
nature, he replies : 

" Such critics must find * The Merry Wives of Windsor ' 
and * Twelfth Night ' very tiresome ; and those who look 
with pleasure at Wilkie's pictures, or those of the Dutch 
school, must admit that excellence of imitation may confer 
attraction on that which would be insipid or disagreeable in 
the reality." 

" I love the things which make me gay," said Miss 
Mitford, " therefore, amongst other things, I love Miss 
Austen." " Dear books," says Mrs. Ritchie, " dear 
books, bright, sparkling with wit and animation, in 
which the homely heroines charm, the dull hours fly, 
and the very bores are enchanting." 

It is partly in this supremely logical charm of Miss 
Austen that we find the completeness of her art. We 
are constantly delighted by each new situation, not 
because it hints at a new trait, but because it develops 
the trait already manifested, and in accordance with 
itself. It is not the charm of discovery, not the de- 
lightfulness of surprise, which enthralls us, but the 
recognition of consistency in character-drawing even 
where there is surprise. Each character is at unity 
with itself. Mr. Bennet, for example, cannot be 
shaken from his ironical habit of looking at things 
by the disgrace which has overtaken his family. 
He is excessively distressed, of course, and hurries 
to London to try to discover the wayward daughter. 
Upon his return, he blames himself for the affair, 
and when Elizabeth tells him he must not be too 
severe upon himself, he says : 

" You may well warn me against such an evil. Human 
nature is so prone to fall into it I No, Lizzy, let me once 



41 6 Jane Austen 

in my life feel how much I have been to blame. I am not 
afraid of being overpowered by the impression. It will pass 
away soon enough." 

" Do you suppose them to be in London? " 

" Yes ; where else can they be so well concealed ? " 

" And Lydia used to want to go to London," added Kitty. 

"She is happy, then," said her father, dryly; "and her 
residence there will probably be of some duration." 

Then, after a short silence, he continued, " Lizzy, I bear 
you no ill-will for being justified in your advice to me last 
May, which, considering the event, shows some greatness 
of mind." 

They were interrupted by Miss Bennet, who came to fetch 
her mother's tea. 

" This is a parade," he cried, " which does one good ; it 
gives such an elegance to misfortune ! Another day I will 
do the same ; I will sit in my library, in my night-cap and 
powdering gown, and give as much trouble as I can, — or 
perhaps I may defer it till Kitty runs away." 

" I am not going to run away, papa," said Kitty, fretfully ; 
" if / should ever go to Brighton, I would behave better 
than Lydia." 

" You go to Brighton ! I would not trust you so near 
as East Bourne for fifty pounds ! No, Kitty, I have at 
least learnt to be cautious, and you will feel the effects of it. 
No officer is ever to enter my house again, nor even to pass 
through the village. Balls will be absolutely prohibited, 
unless you stand up with one of your sisters. And you are 
never to stir out of doors, till you can prove that you have 
spent ten minutes of every day in a rational manner." 

Kitty, who took all these threats in a serious light, began 
to cry. 

" Well, well," said he, "do not make yourself unhappy. 
If you are a good girl for the next ten years, I will take you 
to a review at the end of them." 



Her Wonderful Charm 417 

Mr. Collins concludes a delightfully Collinsy letter 
to Mr. Bennet anent this misfortune in thiswise: 

" Let me advise you, then, my dear sir, to console your- 
self as much as possible, to throw off your unworthy child 
from your affection forever, and leave her to reap the 
fruits of her own heinous offence." 

After Lydia's marriage, there is another letter from 
this exemplary parson, in which he says : 

" I am truly rejoiced that my cousin Lydia's sad business 
has been so well hushed up, and am only concerned that 
their living together before the marriage took place should 
be so generally known. I must not, however, neglect the 
duties of my station, or refrain from declaring my amazement 
at hearing that you received the young couple into your 
house as soon as they were married. It was an encourage- 
ment of vice; and had I been the rector of Longbourn, I 
should very strenuously have opposed it. You ought cer- 
tainly to forgive them as a Christian, but never to admit 
them in your sight, or allow their names to be mentioned in 
your hearing." 

And this same letter cautions Mr. Bennet against 
his acceptance of Mr. Darcy's proposal for the hand 
of Elizabeth, because of the disapproval of Lady 
Catherine de Bourgh; which causes Mr. Bennet to 
declare: 

" Much as I abominate writing, I would not give up Mr. 
CoUins's correspondence for any consideration. Nay, when 
I read a letter of his, I cannot help giving him the prefer- 
ence even over Wickham, much as I value the impudence 
and hypocrisy of my son-in-law." 

Later he writes Mr. Collins: 
27 



41 8 Jane Austen 

" I must trouble you once more for congratulations. 
Elizabeth will soon be the wife of Mr. Darcy. Console 
Lady Catherine as well as you can. But if I were you, I 
would stand by the nephew. He has more to give." 

Finally, this incorrigible gentleman, having in quick 
succession seen three of his daughters disposed of, 
says, in dismissing the third from his library: 

" If any young men come for Mary or Kitty, send them 
in, for I am quite at leisure." 

And Mrs. Bennet ! It will be remembered that she 
wished to go to Brighton with all the family, and she 
now insists that if that plan had been carried out 
the disaster would not have occurred: 

" And now here 's Mr. Bennet gone away, and I know 
he will fight Wickham wherever he meets him, and then he 
will be killed, and what is to become of us all? The Col- 
linses will turn us out before he is cold in his grave ; and 
if you are not kind to us, brother, I do not know what we 
shall do." 

Mr. Gardiner calming her with the assurance that 
he will assist in the search for Lydia, she immedi- 
ately jumps to the conclusion that he will find her, 
and that the marriage will follow: 

" And as for wedding clothes, do not let them wait for 
that, but tell Lydia she shall have as much money as she 
chooses to buy them after they are married. . . . And tell 
my dear Lydia not to give any directions about her clothes 
till she has seen me, for she does not know which are the 
best warehouses. Oh, brother, how kind you are ! I know 
you will contrive it all." 



Her Wonderful Charm 419 

Notwithstanding her dread that Mr. Bennet will be 
killed in the duel which her fears have conjured up, 
she cries out, on hearing of his return without Lydia: 

"What! is he coming home, and without poor Lydia? 
. . . Sure he will not leave London before he has found 
them. Who is to fight Wickham, and make him marry 
her, if he comes away?" 

The girl having been at last discovered and the 
letter- received announcing that the marriage would 
probably soon take place, — 

Mrs. Bennet could hardly contain herself. As soon as 
Jane had read Mr. Gardiner's hope of Lydia's being soon 
married, her joy burst forth, and every following sentence 
added to its exuberance. She was now in an irritation as 
violent from delight as she had ever been fidgety from 
alarm and vexation. To know that her daughter would 
be married was enough. She was disturbed by no fear 
for her felicity, nor humbled by any remembrance of her 
misconduct. 

" My dear, dear Lydia ! " she cried : " this is delight- 
ful indeed ! She will be married ! I shall see her 
again ! She will be married at sixteen 1 My good, kind 
brother ! I knew how it would be — I knew he would 
manage everything. How I long to see her ! and to see 
dear Wickham too ! But the clothes, the wedding clothes 1 
I will write to my sister Gardiner about them directly. 
Lizzy, my dear, run down to your father, and ask him how 
much he will give her. Stay, stay, I will go myself. Ring 
the bell, Kitty, for Hill. I will put on my things in a 
moment. My dear, dear Lydia ! How merry we shall be 
together when we meet ! " 

Her eldest daughter endeavored to give some relief to the 
violence of these transports by leading her thoughts to the 



420 Jane Austen 

obligations which Mr. Gardiner's behavior laid them all 
under. 

" For we must attribute this happy conclusion," she 
added, " in a great measure to his kindness. We are per- 
suaded that he has pledged himself to assist Mr. Wickham 
with money." 

" Well," cried her mother, " it is all very right ; who should 
do it but her own uncle? If he had not had a family of his 
own, I and my children must have had all his money, you 
know ; and it is the very first time we have ever had any- 
thing from him except a few presents. Well ! I am so 
happy. In a short time I shall have a daughter married. 
Mrs. Wickham ! How well it sounds ! And she was only 
sixteen last June. My dear Jane, I am in such a flutter, 
that I am sure I can't write ; so I will dictate and you 
write for me. We will settle with your father about the 
money afterwards ; but the things should be ordered 
immediately." 

She was then proceeding to all the particulars of calico, 
muslin, and cambric, and would soon have dictated some 
very plentiful orders, had not Jane, though with some dif- 
ficulty, persuaded her to wait till her father was at leisure 
to be consulted. One day's delay, she observed, would be 
of small importance ; and her mother was too happy to be 
quite so obstinate as usual. Other schemes, too, came 
into her head. 

" I will go to Meryton," said she, " as soon as I am 
dressed, and tell the good, good news to my sister Philips. 
And as I come back I can call on Lady Lucas and Mrs, 
Long. Kitty, run down and order the carriage. An airing 
would do me a great deal of good, I am sure. Girls, can I 
do anything for you in Meryton ? Oh ! here comes Hill. 
My dear Hill, have you heard the good news? Miss Lydia 
is going to be married ; and you shall all have a bowl of 
punch to make merry at her wedding." 



Her Wonderful Charm 421 

It was a fortnight since Mrs. Bennet had been down- 
stairs, but on this happy day she again took her seat at the 
head of her table, and in spirits oppressively high. No 
sentiment of shame gave a damp to her triumph. The 
marriage of a daughter, which had been the first object of 
her wishes since Jane was sixteen, was now on the point of 
accomplishment, and her thoughts and her words ran 
wholly on those attendants of elegant nuptials, fine muslins, 
new carriages, and servants. She was busily searching 
through the neighborhood for a proper situation for her 
daughter ; and without knowing or considering what their 
income might be, rejected many as deficient in size and 
importance. 

" Hyde Park might do," said she, " if the Gouldings 
would quit it, or the great house at Stoke, if the drawing- 
room were larger ; but Ashworth is too far off. I could not 
bear to have her ten miles from me ; and as for Purvis 
Lodge, the attics are dreadful." 

Her husband allowed her to talk on without interruption 
while the servants remained. But when they had with- 
drawn, he said to her, " Mrs. Bennet, before you take any, 
or all of these houses, for your son and daughter, let us 
come to a right understanding. Into one house in this 
neighborhood they shall never have admittance. I will not 
encourage the imprudence of either by receiving them at 
Longbourn." 

A long dispute followed this declaration ; but Mr. Bennet 
was firm : it soon led to another ; and Mrs. Bennet found, 
to her amazement and horror, that her husband would not 
advance a guinea to buy clothes for his daughter. He 
protested that she should receive from him no mark of affec- 
tion whatever on the occasion. Mrs. Bennet could hardly 
comprehend it. That his anger could be carried to such a 
point of inconceivable resentment as to refuse his daughter 
a privilege without which her marriage would scarcely 



42 2 J^ne Austen 

seem valid, exceeded all that she could believe possible. 
She was more alive to the disgrace which her want of new 
clothes must reflect on her daughter's nuptials than to any 
sense of shame at her eloping and living with Wickham 
a fortnight before they took place. 

Mrs. Bennet declares that she hates the very sight 
of Mr. Darcy, but when Elizabeth makes known her 
engagement, — 

Its effect was most extraordinary; for, on first hearing 
it Mrs. Bennet sat quite still, and unable to utter a 
syllable. Nor was it under many, many minutes, that she 
could comprehend what she heard, though not in general 
backward to credit what was for the advantage of her 
family, or that came in the shape of a lover to any of them. 
She began at length to recover, to fidget about in her chair, 
get up, sit down again, wonder, and bless herself. 

" Good gracious ! Lord bless me ! only think ! dear me ! 
Mr. Darcy ! who would have thought it ? And is it really 
true ? Oh, my sweetest Lizzy ! how rich and how great 
you will be ! What pin-money, what jewels, what carriages 
you will have ! Jane's is nothing to it — nothing at all. 
I am so pleased — so happy. Such a charming man ! so 
handsome, so tall ! Oh, my dear Lizzy ! A house in town ! 
Everything that is charming ! Three daughters married ! 
Ten thousand a year ! Oh, Lord ! what will become of 
me? I shall go distracted." 

Mr. Woodhouse is incapable of penetrating the 
somewhat deceptive character of Frank Churchill, 
but thinks that young man " is not quite the thing" 
— why? " He has been opening the doors very 
often this evening, and keeping them open very 
inconsiderately. He does not think of the draught. 
I do not mean to set you against him, but indeed, he 



Her Wonderful Charm 423 

IS not quite the thing." Every view of Mr. Wood- 
house is from the standpoint of the valetudinarian, 
and all moral judgments are filtered through the 
mists of his delicate health. When Emma exhibits 
her portrait of Miss Smith for the approval of the 
family, her father's only criticism is that the subject 
of the sketch "seems to be sitting out of doors, with 
only a little shawl over her shoulders ; and it makes 
one think she must catch cold." 

" But, my dear papa, it is supposed to be summer, a warm 
day in the summer. Look at the trees." 

" But it is never safe to sit out of doors, ray dear." 

When Emma consents to marry Knightley, every 
reader asks himself how can Mr. Woodhouse's 
approval be gained? and, as expected, he is "so 
miserable " when the subject is proposed to him that 
the couple are " almost hopeless." But with her 
usual comic gift and logical consistency. Miss Austen 
turns this same habitual nervousness into the reason 
for his final acquiescence : 

In this state of suspense they were befriended, not by 
any sudden illumination of Mr. Woodhouse's mind, or any 
wonderful change of his nervous system, but by the opera- 
tion of the same system in another way. Mrs. Weston's 
poultry house was robbed one night of all her turkeys, — 
evidently by the ingenuity of man. Other poultry yards in 
the neighborhood also suffered. Pilfering was house-break- 
ing to Mr. Woodhouse's fears. He was very uneasy; and 
but for the sense of his son-in law's protection would have 
been under wretched alarm every night of his life. The 
strength, resolution, and presence of mind of the Mr. Knight- 
leys commanded his fullest dependence. While either of 



424 Jane Austen 

them protected him and his, Hartfield was safe. But Mr. 
John Knightley must be in London again by the end of the 
first week in November. 

The result of this distress was, that with a much more 
voluntary cheerful consent than his daughter had ever 
presumed to hope for at the moment, she was able to 
fix her wedding-day ; and Mr. Elton was called on, within 
a month from the marriage of Mr. and Mrs. Robert Mar- 
tin, to join the hands of Mr. Knightley and Miss Wood- 
house. 

It is in castastrophe that character shines. We do 
not realize the nature of asbestos until the fire attacks 
it. The temptation of the novelist to bring out some 
hitherto unsuspected quality in some sharp moment 
of peril or disaster is not often enough resisted, with the 
result of a lack of agreement between the climax and 
what has led up to it. Miss Austen's logic is too sure to 
permit her ever making that mistake. Each of her 
characters is true to itself always; and when such 
truthfulness illustrates inconsequence, and such conse- 
quence illumines self-deceit, the end gained is as 
amusing to behold as it is difficult to accomplish. 
Satire has to do with foolish people. Now, foolish 
people are never logical in any broad sense, yet fre- 
quently logical in a narrow sense. For example, 
when Sir John Middleton is made acquainted with 
Willoughby's baseness, his censure does not find an 
outlet in moral indignation, but in a mere disappoint- 
ment that " so bold a rider " could act thus. " It was 
only the last time they met that he had offered him 
one of Folly's puppies. And this was the end of it!" 
The habitually light cannot be roused by tremendous 
events from their levity, and great events have the 
same narrow judgments as small events. 



Her Wonderful Charm 425 

Mrs. Palmer, in her way, was equally angry. She was 
determined to drop his acquaintance immediately, and she 
was very thankful that she had never been acquainted with 
him at all. She wished with all her heart Combe Magna 
was not 60 near Cleveland ; but it did not signify, for it was 
a great dfeal too far off to visit ; she hated him so much 
that she nvas resolved never to mention his name again, 
and she should tell everybody she saw how good-for-nothing 
he was. 

" He that is unjust, let him be unjust still ; and he 
which is filthy, let him be filthy still ; and he that is 
righteous let him be righteous still ; and he that is 
holy let him be holy still." And this by a girl not 
yet in her majority ! 



No one knew better the winding self-deceits of the 
human heart. Her lack of the broadest sympathies 
concentrated her gaze all the more keenly at the par- 
ticular weakness. She was a great diagnostician. She 
does not hate, although she scorns. She is therefore 
not distracted by an indignation which distorts the 
vision into seeing faults which do not exist; and if 
she magnifies the faults, it is in the same way that the 
naturalist magnifies the insect under his glass. She 
never blackens a character, no matter how black the 
character may be. She knows it is not necessary to 
make John Dashwood brutal or insolent to his sister 
and her family. " His manners to them, though calm, 
were perfectly kind." Yet he forces them, through 
his cruel selfishness, to the point of destitution, de- 
ceiving himself all the while with such specious ex- 



426 ]^^^ Austen 

cuses that he would have thought a grave injustice 
done him had he been called to account. 

Mr. John Dashwood had not the strong feelings of the 
rest of the family ; but he was affected by the recommenda- 
tion of such a nature at such a time, and he promised 
to do everything in his power to make them comfortable. 
His father was rendered easy by such an assurance, and 
Mr. John Dashwood had then leisure to consider how much 
there might prudently be in his power to do for them. 

He was not an ill-disposed young man, unless to be 
rather cold-hearted and rather selfish is to be ill-disposed ; 
but he was in general well-respected, for he conducted 
himself with propriety in the discharge of his ordinary duties. 
Had he married a more amiable woman, he might have 
been made still more respectable than he was ; he might 
even have been made amiable himself, for he was very 
young when he married and very fond of his wife. But 
Mrs. John Dashwood was a strong caricature of himself; 
more narrow-minded and selfish. 

When he gave his promise to his father, he meditated 
within himself to increase the fortunes of his sisters by the 
present of a thousand pounds apiece. He then really 
thought himself equal to it. The prospect of four thousand 
a year, in addition to his present income, besides the re- 
maining half of his own mother's fortune, warmed his heart 
and made him feel capable of generosity. " Yes, he would 
give them three thousand pounds ; it would be liberal and 
handsome ! It would be enough to make them completely 
easy. Three thousand pounds ! he could spare so consid- 
erable a sum with little inconvenience." He thought of it 
all day long and for many days successively, and he did not 
repent. . . . 

Mrs. John Dashwood did not at all approve of what her 
husband intended to do for his sisters. To take three 
thousand pounds from the fortune of their dear little boy 



Her Wonderful Charm 427 

would be impoverishing him to the most dreadful degree. 
She begged him to think again on the subject. How could 
he answer to himself to rob his child, and his only child, 
too, of so large a sum ? And what possible claim could the 
Miss Dashwoods, who were related to him only by half 
blood, which she considered as no relationship at all, have 
on his generosity to so large an amount ? It was very well 
known that no affection was ever supposed to exist between 
the children of any man by different marriages ; and why 
was he to ruin himself, and their poor little Harry, by giving 
away all his money to his half-sisters? 

" It was my father's last request to me," replied her hus- 
band, " that I should assist his widow and daughters." 

" He did not know what he was talking of, I daresay ; 
ten to one but he was light-headed at the time. Had he 
been in his right senses he could not have thought of such 
a thing as begging you to give away half your fortune from 
your own child." 

" He did not stipulate for any particular sum, my dear 
Fanny ; he only requested me, in general terms, to assist 
them, and to make their situation more comfortable than it 
was in his power to do. Perhaps it would have been as 
well if he had left it wholly to myself. He could hardly 
suppose I should neglect them. But as he required the 
promise, I could not do less than give it, — at least, I thought 
so at the time. The promise therefore was given, and must 
be performed. Something must be done for them — " 

" Well then /(?/ something be done for them ; but if/iaf 
something need not be three thousand pounds. Consider," 
she added, " that when the money is once parted with, it 
never can return. Your sisters will marry, and it will be 
gone for ever. If, indeed, it could ever be restored to our 
poor little boy — " 

" Why, to be sure," said her husband, very gravely, " that 
would make a great difference. " The time may come 



428 Jane Austen 

when Harry will regret that so large a sum was parted with. 
If he should have a numerous family, for instance, it would 
be a very convenient addition." 

" To be sure it would." 

" Perhaps, then, it would be better for all parties if the 
sum were diminished one-half. Five hundred pounds would 
be a prodigious increase to their fortunes ! " 

" Oh ! beyond anything great ! What brother on earth 
would do half as much for his sisters, even if really his sisters ! 
And as it is — only half-blood ! But you have such a gen- 
erous spirit ! " 

" I would not wish to do anything mean," he replied. 
" One had rather, on such occasions, do too much than too 
little. No one, at least, can think I have not done enough 
for them : even themselves, they can hardly expect more." 

" There is no knowing what they may expect," said the 
lady ; " but we are not to think of their expectations : the 
question is, what you can afford to do." 

" Certainly ; and I think I may afford to give them five 
hundred pounds apiece. As it is, without any addition of 
mine, they will each have three thousand pounds on their 
mother's death — a very comfortable income for any young 
woman." 

" To be sure it is ; and indeed, it strikes me that they 
can want no addition at all. They will have ten thousand 
pounds divided amongst them. If they marry, they will be 
sure of doing well, and if they do not, they may all live 
very comfortably together on the interest of ten thousand 
pounds." 

" That is very true, and therefore I do not know whether 
upon the whole it would not be more advisable to do some- 
thing for their mother while she hves, rather than for them 
— something of the annuity kind, I mean. My sisters 
would feel the good effects of it as well as herself. A hun- 
dred a year would make them all perfectly comfortable." 



Her Wonderful Charm 429 

His wife hesitated a little, however, in giving her con- 
sent to this plan. 

" To be sure," said she, " it is better than parting with 
fifteen hundred pounds at once. But then, if Mrs. Dash- 
wood should live fifteen years, we shall be completely 
taken in." 

" Fifteen years ! my dear Fanny, her life cannot be worth 
half that purchase." 

" Certainly not ; but if you observe, people always live 
for ever when there is any annuity to be paid them ; and 
she is very stout and healthy, and hardly forty. An annuity 
is a very serious business ; it comes over and over every 
year, and there is no getting rid of it. You are not aware 
of what you are doing. I have known a great deal of the 
trouble of annuities ; for my mother was clogged with the 
payment of three to old superannuated servants by my 
father's will, and it is amazing how disagreeable she found it. 
Twice every year these annuities were to be paid ; and 
then there was the trouble of getting it to them ; and then 
one of them was said to have died, and afterwards it turned 
out to be no such thing. My mother was quite sick of it. 
Her income was not her own, she said, with such perpetual 
claims on it ; and it was the more unkind in my father 
because, otherwise, the money would have been entirely at my 
mother's disposal without any restriction whatever. It has 
given me such an abhorrence of annuities, that I am sure I 
would not pin myself down to the payment of one for all the 
world." 

" It is certainly an unpleasant thing," replied Mr. Dash- 
wood, " to have those kind of yearly drains on one's income. 
One's fortune, as your mother justly says, is not one's own. 
To be tied down to the regular payment of such a sum, on 
every rent day, is by no means desirable ; it takes away one's 
independence." 

" Undoubtedly ; and after all, you have no thanks for it. 



430 Jan^e Austen 

They think themselves secure ; you do no more than what 
is expected, and it raises no gratitude at all. If I were you, 
whatever I did should be done at ray own discretion en- 
tirely. I would not bind myself to allow them anything 
yearly. It may be very inconvenient some years to spare a 
hundred, or even fifty pounds, from our own expenses." 

" I believe you are right, my love ; it will be better that 
there should be no annuity in the case : whatever I may 
give them occasionally will be of far greater assistance than 
a yearly allowance, because they would only enlarge their 
style of living if they felt sure of a larger income, and would 
not be sixpence the richer for it at the end of the year. It 
will certainly be much the best way. A present of fifty 
pounds now and then will prevent their ever being distressed 
for money, and will, I think, be amply discharging my 
promise to my father." 

" To be sure it will. Indeed, to say the truth, I am con- 
vinced within myself that your father had no idea of your 
giving them any money at all. The assistance he thought 
of, I dare say, was only such as might be reasonably ex- 
pected of you ; for instance, such as looking out for a 
comfortable small house for them, helping them to move 
their things, and sending them presents of fish and game, 
and so forth, whenever they are in season. I '11 lay my life 
that he meant nothing farther ; indeed, it would be very 
strange and unreasonable if he did. Do but consider, my 
dear Mr. Dashwood, how excessively comfortable your 
mother-in-law and her daughters may live on the interest of 
seven thousand pounds, besides the thousand pounds belong- 
ing to each of the girls, which brings them in fifty pounds a 
year apiece, and of course, they will pay their mother 
for their board out of it. Altogether, they will have five 
hundred a year amongst them ; and what on earth can 
four women want for more than that? They will live so 
cheap ! Their housekeeping will be nothing at all. They 



Her Wonderful Charm 431 

will have no carriage, no horses, and hardly any servant ; 
they will keep no company, and can have no expenses 
of any kind 1 Only conceive how comfortable they will 
be ! Five hundred a year ! I am sure I cannot imagine 
how they will spend half of it ; and as to your giving 
Ihem more, it is quite absurd to think of it. They will be 
much more able to gwt you something." 

" Upon my word," said Mr. Dashwood, " I believe you 
are perfectly right. My father certainly could mean no- 
thing more by his request to me than what you say. I 
clearly understand it now, and I will strictly fulfil my 
engagement by such acts of assistance and kindness as 
you have described. When my mother removes into 
another house my services shall be readily given to ac- 
commodate her as far as I can. Some little present of 
furniture, too, may be acceptable then." 

" Certainly," returned Mrs. John Dashwood. " But, 
however, one thing must be considered. When your 
father and mother moved to Norland, though the furni- 
ture of Shanhill was sold, all the china, plate, and linen 
was saved, and is now left to your mother. Her house 
will therefore be almost completely fitted up as soon as 
she takes it." 

" That is a material consideration undoubtedly. A 
valuable legacy indeed ! and yet some of the plate would 
have been a very pleasant addition to our own stock 
here." 

" Yes ; and the set of breakfast-china is twice as hand- 
some as what belongs to this house ; a great deal too 
handsome, in my opinion, for any place they can afford 
to live in. But, however, so it is. Your father thought 
only of thej?t. And I must say this, that you owe no 
particular gratitude to him, nor attention to his wishes ; 
for we very well know that if he could he would have 
left almost everything in the world to ihemy 



432 Jane Austen 

This argument was irresistible. It gave to his intentions 
whatever of decision was wanting before ; and he finally 
resolved that it would be absolutely unnecessary, if not 
highly indecorous, to do more for the widow and children 
of his father than such kind of neighborly acts as his own 
wife pointed out. 

His is pre-eminently the standpoint of the worship 
of mammon, which discovers the highest virtue in 
the biggest bank account. " His manners to them, 
though calm, were perfectly kind . . . and on Col- 
onel Brandon's coming in, soon after himself, he 
eyed him with a curiosity which seemed to say 
that he only wanted to know him to be rich, to be 
equally civil to him." Did you not observe this same 
John Dashwood at the reception last night? The 
world is full of him. 

When her father asks Elizabeth Elliot how they 
can retrench, she, 

in the first ardor of female alarm, set seriously to think 
what could be done, and had finally proposed these two 
branches of economy, — to cut off some unnecessary chari- 
ties, and to refrain from new furnishing the drawing-room ; 
to which expedients she afterwards added the happy thought 
of their taking no present down to Anne, as had been the 
usual yearly custom. 

There is always this exquisite truth of portrayal. 
Lady Middleton exclaims, on hearing of Willoughby's 
villainy, " Very shocking ! " yet in the interest of her 
assemblies thinks herself justified in leaving her card 
with Mrs. Willoughby, as she would be a woman of 
elegance and fortune. And her " calm and polite 
unconcern " is contrasted with the affectionate anxiety 



Her Wonderful Charm 433 

of Elinor, who is forced to see, with that cruel insight 
which experience with the world brings, that — 

every qualification is raised at times by the circumstances 
of the moment to more than its real value ; and she was 
sometimes worried down by officious condolence to rate 
good breeding as more indispensable to comfort than good 
nature. 

XI 

Enough has been shown to substantiate the claim 
we have made that Miss Austen occupies the highest 
rank as a mistress of taste, and that her elegant dis- 
cernment is more than a mere worldly insight as to 
social conformities. It is the reflection of inward 
grace; the elegance is of the mind. And like some 
subtle acid which can, with unfailing accuracy, dis- 
cover the purity or the impurity of the metal subjected 
to its test. Miss Austen's real elegance, coming in 
contact with the false, reveals the difference between 
the two. Knowing that one does not have to go out 
of one's class in one's search for vulgarities, she does 
not go out of hers to secure her contrasts : even Mrs. 
Elton is connected with it. I fancy this keen-eyed girl 
saw her Mrs. Elton many times in her walk through life. 
In one of her letters she records calling on a Miss A. 
at Lyme, " who sat darning a pair of stockings the 
whole of my visit." ^ One of Mrs. Elton's charming 
little familiarities is her habit of addressing Mr. 
Knightley by his surname. 

"And who do you think came in while we were there?" 
Emma was quite at a loss. The tone implied some old 
acquaintance, and how could she possibly guess? 

1 Austen-Leigh, p. 242. 
28 



434 J^rie Austen 

" Knightley ! " continued Mrs. Elton ; — " Knightley 
himself! Was it not lucky? For, not being within 
when he called the other day, I had never seen him 
before ; and, of course, as so particular a friend of Mr. E.'s, 
I had a great curiosity. ' My friend Knightley ' had been 
so often mentioned that I was really impatient to see him ; 
and I must do my caro sposo the justice to say that he 
need not be ashamed of his friend. Knightley is quite the 
gentleman ; I like him very much. Decidedly, I think, a 
very gentlemanlike man." 

This instance of unrefinement was perhaps not so 
uncommon in Miss Austen's day as may be supposed. 
Mr. Russell tells of Lady Holland, "whose curiosity 
was restrained by no considerations of courtesy," 
questioning the famous Henry Luttrell about his age: 
" Now, Luttrell, we are all dying to know how old 
you are. Just tell me." " If I live till next year," 
said Luttrell, in reply, " I shall be — devilish old,"^ 
"The Miss Burneys," says this delightful raconteur, 
" who had been the correspondents of Horace Wal- 
pole, and who carried down to the fifties the most 
refined traditions of the social life of the last century, 
habitually ' damned * the teakettle if it burned their 
fingers, and called their male friends by their sur- 
names. ' Come, Milnes, will you have a cup of 
tea?' 'Now, Macaulay, we have had enough of 
that subject.' " ^ 

Her Mrs. Eltons may still be found in every parish. 
This cannot be said of the characters of most fiction 
one hundred years old, and it is one of the chief 
"notes" of her genius. I doubt if you could catch 

1 ' Collections and Recollections,' p. 176. 

2 lb., p. 76. 



Her Wonderful Charm 435 

her napping on any of the small points of etiquette 
mentioned in her novels. She has been criticised for 
allowing Mr. Bingley to send out verbal invitations to 
balls ; which is as valuable as most criticisms of the 
sort, because " Mrs. Bennet . . , was particularly flat- 
tered by receiving an invitation from Mr. Bingley 
himself, instead of a ceremonious card." The special 
fact recorded, the particular character emphasized, 
in Miss Austen's work are always true in themselves, 
true to the circumstance and type of the moment, 
but — and here lies the line of demarkation — also 
true to the broad general type governing all ages 
and above all changes of time and custom. The 
reader cannot construct for himself any broad picture 
of the times out of ' Clarissa Harlowe.' The concern is 
entirely local; and, on the other hand, the book has 
no living human interest to-day, because of its discon- 
nection with the interests which abide through all 
ages. Richardson is not an observer of general life, 
and we therefore get from him characters, but not 
types. This is true also, in a less degree, of Miss 
Edgeworth, for we are not so certain what her young 
women would do in other circumstances than those 
in which she had placed them ; whereas Elinor Dash- 
wood and Anne Elliot might be introduced into any 
situation without any fear as to their ease of behavior 
there. The romanticists suffer from the opposite 
fault, for with them the characters become mere 
chess-pieces. How many names can even the in- 
terested reader of Walpole and Mrs. Radcliffe recall 
to memory? It is a great distinction to be known as 
the creator of a character which remains a character 
while not ceasing to be a type, and remains a type 
without becoming a puppet. 



43 6 Jane Austen 

' Northanger Abbey,' * Pride and Prejudice,* and 
'Sense and Sensibility' are contemporaneous with 
'Camilla;' yet 'Camilla' is as extinct as the pter- 
odactyl, while Catherine Morland, Elizabeth Bennet, 
and Elinor Dashwood still interest us as deeply as 
the heroine of any novel written in the past ten 
years. They are as real to us as Mary Queen of 
Scots, and visitors to the scenes they once graced 
with their imagined presence are chiefly interested 
in the localities for that reason. Apropos, there is a 
good story told of Tennyson at Lyme-Regis. When 
some one wanted to show him the precise spot where 
the Duke of Monmouth landed, he broke out: 
" Don't talk to me of the Duke of Monmouth. Show 
me the precise spot where Louise Musgrove fell." 
Miss Austen did not conform to the favorite stand- 
ards of her day as closely as did Miss Burney and 
Miss Ferrier ; yet by reason of her attitude towards 
the abiding realities of every day she is alive to this 
day with a perpetual youth, while they are read only 
as " curiosities of literature." She conformed to the 
inner sense appropriate to all time. 

If, as Aristotle maintains, epic and tragic poetry is 
more philosophical than history, because the latter, 
dealing with the individual, may fail to illustrate the 
general, whereas the former gives a comprehensive 
general view from which the particular may be de- 
duced, — if this is true, it is equally true of the novel, 
which would doubtless have been included in Aris- 
totle's comparison had it existed in his day. What 
we ask for in the novel is the general, with the indi- 
vidual in agreement with it, not an exception to it. 
This is what makes nearly every one of Miss Austen's 
characters a success. The curates in ' Shirley ' are a 



Her Wonderful Charm 437 

comic failure because the indignation, the personal 
resentment, of their creator interfered with the ob- 
jective truth ; and a comparison with the elder lady's 
Mr. Collins, Mr. Elton, and Dr. Grant will illustrate 
the point. Instead of a passionate scorn, there is an 
intellectual contempt. The humor softens the obser- 
vation, and the interest is in the characters, not away 
from them, as with Miss Bronte. Because of this, 
notwithstanding the smallness of Miss Austen's scale, 
— notwithstanding the "three or four families in a 
country village " which she deemed enough to work 
on, her scheme is not provincial. She is parochial, 
but not provincial, for it is not the limited scene 
which makes for provincialism in literature, but the 
spirit which controls the painter of the scene, 
* Middlemarch ' is a study of a provincial com- 
munity, not a provincial study. Lydgate and Doro- 
thea, typifying the universal caught in the network 
of the provincial, constitute the world-wide interest 
of the story. So in Miss Austen we get a perfect 
picture of the country life of the early century; her 
microcosm corresponds with the macrocosm, and the 
universal is there in the individual.^ She is old- 
fashioned, and yet modern, — a proof of which 
uniquely distinguished position is that it is impos- 

1 It is characteristic of the important distinction between these 
two things that while we see certain situations in Miss Austen's fiction 
prompted by similar situations in her family, we cannot place the 
scenes as we can with Charlotte Bronte. The son of Mr. Weston 
becomes a Churchill as the son of Mr. Austen becomes a Knight. 
William Price was presumably suggested by one of her sailor brothers. 
There is the same relationship between Chawton Cottage and Chaw- 
ton House that there is between the Great House and Upper Cross 
Cottage in ' Persuasion.' But her art makes the similarity purely ac- 
cidental ; and whenever she wishes to hide a locality, she does so. 



43 8 Jane Austen 

sible to burlesque her. Of none of the works of her 
female contemporaries could scenes be collected for 
theatrical representation to-day, unless with the 
avowed intention of caricature. 



XII 

In its last analysis genius is common-sense. How 
can it be when it is so uncommon? But common- 
sense, too, is uncommon; and the one is no more 
uncommon than the other. The Aristotelian view is 
that this sense is the faculty which has the power to 
reduce the other conflicting senses into unity, — that 
it is the schoolmaster of the senses. That implies 
power not given to all : it is common in a compli- 
mentary sense, only, — applicable to the mind as it 
should be, and as it would be if unhampered by error 
and vice. A man with a squint cannot see straight; 
and those possessed of mental squints are far more 
numerous than the physically deformed. 

The appreciation of the totality of impressions re- 
quires gifts denied the herd, or which the herd decline 
to use. One perceives sight; another, touch; a third, 
smell; but the master only perceives the general sense 
of life — which is a second definition of common-sense. 
If we adopt the Scotch philosophy, the point is still 
maintainable, for it also implies a faculty, — a power 
to test truth by " the complement of those cognitions 
or convictions which we receive from nature," But 
how few are really receptive ! And how few of those 
few make use of their receptivity ! Intellectual train- 
ing is not essential. The genius may be a backwoods- 
man, and the professor of mental science may not be 
a genius. The power may be of the soul; insight 



Her Wonderful Charm 439 

may take the place of pains-taking system; and in- 
sight is but the flash-Hght manifestation of this same 
faculty. 

The metaphysical definitions of common-sense 
meet only that constitution of the human mind which 
is beneficently full-powered. It is the normal mind 
intended by the Great Framer, not the average mind 
of our acquaintance. Genius is uncommon; and it 
is that general sense which is called " common," but 
which becomes special (through the general incapacity 
to use it), and therefore uncommon. 

Miss Austen's near approach to this universal stand- 
ard is what lifts her above the passing standards of 
any particular time. Common-sense, and humor, 
which is its minister, the dramatic gift, and the con- 
stant remembrance of the purpose of the novel, are 
what make her as distinguished to-day as when she 
wrote her immortal fictions. 

Her view is " worldly," let us admit. She is not 
moved by any deep spirituality, for reasons that we 
have seen. Her books generally open with an in- 
ventory of the earthly possessions of her characters. 
Her remarks are sometimes tinged by a vague "tired," 
or perhaps one had better say impatient, note, as 
though the highest trust had been dampened by ex- 
perience beyond much hope of a return to childish 
optimism. There is not the slightest bitterness, but 
the touch is delicately unexpectant of enthusiasm. 
Her letters are witty, bantering, sprightly, rather than 
blithe. After describing a new hat to her sister, she 
writes : " I flatter myself, however, that you can 
understand very little of it from this description. 
Heaven forbid that I should ever offer such encour- 
agement to explanations as to give a clear one on 



440 J^ne Austen 

any occasion myself." ^ She can speak coolly of ' Don 
Giovanni ' : " They revelled last night in ' Don Juan,' 
whom we left in hell at half-past eleven. We had 
scaramouch and a ghost and were delighted. I speak 
oi them; my delight was very tranquil." ^ And she 
confesses Miss O'Neill in ' Isabella' not equal to her 
expectation : " I fancy I want something more than can 
be. I took two pocket-handkerchiefs, but had very 
little occasion for either. She is an elegant creature, 
however, and hugs Mr. Young delightfully." ^ 

One would call Miss Austen a thorough woman of 
the world but for the danger of misconstruing the term 
into something more than it stands for in her case. 
She certainly took a real delight in its obvious pleas- 
ures; but her sense of humor appreciated its absurd- 
ities too keenly to permit her wishing to become a 
devotee of fashion. She is distinctly not a snob, for 
she makes Mrs. Gardiner, a City woman, as real a 
lady as any of her characters, — nay, much more of a 
^^;///^woman than Lady de Bourgh; and Darcy has to 
blush for his aunt as much as for his mother-in-law. 
The "impatient" note is inseparable from a 
"worldly" view; and her elegant femininity trans- 
muted what would have been cynicism in an equally 
endowed male into its softened counterpart. 

1 Brabourne, vol. i., p. 187. Here see the modern note of impa- 
tience. Miss Repplier might have written it yesterday. 

2 lb., ii., p. 149. There was good reason for the tired note on 
this occasion, for they got a great dea\ for their money in those days 
at the opera. On this particular night, ' Don Giovanni ' was the 
last of " three musical things." And after the ' Merchant of Venice,' 
on another occasion, Elliston appeared in a three-act comedy. [Bra- 
bourne, ii., p. 323] The "continuous performance" is evidently not 
a modern invention. 

3 Brabourne, ii., p. 321. 



Her Wonderful Charm 441 

She is all the moralist that a novel writer need be. 
Too true an artist, too keen a humorist, to obtrude 
the moral, it is nevertheless there. Granting things 
which exist in Miss Austen's case, a "worldly" writer 
can best criticise worldliness, — witness Thackeray. 
The confessed " worldliness " of him and of Miss 
Austen passes into the satire of the thing they are in 
their separate degrees ; which is what makes them 
lovable, though they would be more lovable were 
they less "worldly" without at the same time being 
less human, which is generally the fault of the less 
worldly. 

But all serious novels are, after all, novels of pur- 
pose. If we do not find any deep emotion in Miss 
Austen's ethics, we must recall once more the times 
in which she wrote. It was, in the first place, a great 
accomplishment to make a novel at once interesting 
and clean ; for cleanliness is not only next to godli- 
ness, it is next before it. There was, besides the 
clean hands of Miss Austen, the pure heart; and her 
distinguished delicacy was but the reflection of a 
sound inward undefilement. The common-sense of 
which we have spoken throws the situation into a 
clear light, in which morality can work out its destiny. 
" What have wealth and grandeur to do with happi- 
ness?" cries the sentimental Marianne, "Grandeur 
has but little," says Elinor, " but wealth has much to 
do with it." The purpose of this novel is thus to con- 
trast the "sense" of Elinor with the " sensibility" of 
Marianne, and to show that the real sensibility lay in 
Elinor. "Sensibility" in that day — and not exclu- 
sively in that day either — was really a gross senti- 
mentality, all the more harmfully fatal in that it was 
cultivated as ideally true. It is not the frauds that 



442 Jane Austen 

do the most harm in the world; it is the honestly 
mistaken people. And the conclusion is that — 

Marianne Dashwood was born to an extraordinary fate. 
She was born to discover the falsehood of her own opinions, 
and to counteract by her conduct her most favorite maxims. 
She was born to overcome an affection formed so late in 
life as at seventeen and, with no sentiment superior to strong 
esteem and lively friendship, voluntarily to give her hand to 
another ! and that other, a man who had suffered no less 
than herself under the event of a former attachment, whom, 
two years before she had considered too old to be married, — 
and who still sought the constitutional safeguard of a flannel 
waistcoat ! 

That is not the only moral, however, of ' Sense and 
Sensibility.' Selfishness is there, as elsewhere, the 
chief object of Miss Austen's satire ; and Elinor's just 
course is contrasted not only with her sister's absorb- 
ing sentimentality, but with the equally insistent 
selfishness of Lucy Steele. 

The whole of Lucy's behavior in the affair, and the 
prosperity which crowned it, therefore, may be held forth 
as a most encouraging instance of what an earnest, an 
unceasing attention to self-interest, however its progress 
may be apparently obstructed, will do in securing every 
advantage of fortune, with no other sacrifice than that of 
time and conscience. 

There are not many stronger pictures in fiction of 
a busy-bodied selfishness than the scenes in which 
Mrs. Norris and Mrs. John Dashwood disport them- 
selves. She does not say, like Miss Edgeworth," This 
is taken from real life ; " she has her laugh at the 
didacticists who conclude with a sermon; she allows 



Her Wonderful Charm 443 

her delighted readers to apply the moral, and finishes 
* Northanger Abbey ' with shocking levity : 

. . . and professing myself . . . convinced that the 
General's unjust interference, so far from being really inju- 
rious to their felicity, was perhaps rather conducive to it, 
by improving their knowledge of each other, and adding 
strength to their attachment, I leave it to be settled by 
whomsoever it may concern whether the tendency of this 
work be altogether to recommend paternal tyranny or 
reward filial disobedience. 

But the moral is nowhere more evident than in 
Miss Austen, and the Nemesis never more sure. Her 
dramatic sense always prompts the comic situation, 
as well as the comic dialogue. How delicious the 
humor with which the appreciation of Miss Bates is 
conveyed for the good time she had had at the 
party the previous evening ! The good lady calls 
from her window to Mr. Knightley passing on horse- 
back below — 

" Oh, Mr. Knightley, what a delightful party last night ! 
how extremely pleasant ! Did you ever see such dancing? 
Was not it delightful? Miss Woodhouse and Mr. Frank 
Churchill ; I never saw anything equal to it " — 

those two young persons being in the adjoining room, 
and, of course, hearing it all. Mr. Knightley replies: 

" Oh, very delightful indeed ! I can say nothing less, 
for I suppose Miss Woodhouse and Mr. Frank Churchill 
are hearing everything that passes. And (raising his voice 
still more) I do not see why Miss Fairfax should not be 
mentioned, too. I think Miss Fairfax dances very well ; 
and Mrs. Weston is the very best country- dance player, 
without exception, in England. Now, if your friends have 



444 ]^^^ Austen 

any gratitude, they will say something pretty loud about you 
and me in return." 

This dramatic power in a purely comic scene 
prompts one to expect a mastery of irony extended 
to the moral situations ; and the expectation is ful- 
filled. Lady de Bourgh's visit to Elizabeth brings 
about the very thing she wishes to prevent. Mrs. 
Norris is compelled to live with the disgraced niece 
she has chiefly helped to spoil ; and Mrs. Fer- 
rars disinherits Edward in behalf of Robert, who 
straightway marries the girl his brother was disinher- 
ited for not giving up. Of the evil eff"ects of riotous 
match-making, Emma, Mrs. Norris, and Mrs. Jennings 
are standing warnings ; and for Emma there is a 
special Nemesis for each of her offences, — the first 
making the man she despises propose to her, and the 
second making the girl she despises fall in love with 
the man she wishes to propose to her ! It is no less 
— it is all the more — a Nemesis because it wears a 
comic mask. 

Not that she is frivolous in treating of the graver 
issues of life. She does not flirt with tragedy; she 
avoids it. " Let other pens dwell on guilt and mis- 
ery," she says. " I quit such odious subjects as soon 
as I can, impatient to restore everybody not greatly 
in fault themselves to tolerable comfort, and to have 
done with all the rest." Her logical comedy leads 
up to the tragic episode in 'Mansfield Park;* but 
because her field ts comedy, the circumstance is 
episodical. The treatment is severe enough while it 
lasts. " In all the important preparations of the 
mind she was complete; being prepared for matri- 
mony by a hatred of home restraint and tranquillity, 



Her Wonderful Charm 445 

by the misery of disappointed affection, and contempt 
for the man she was to marry. The rest might wait." 



Too late he became aware how unfavorable to the char- 
acter of any young people must be the totally opposite 
treatment which Maria and Julia had always been experi- 
encing at home, where the excessive indulgence and flattery 
of their aunt had been continually contrasted with his own 
severity. He saw how ill he had judged, in expecting to 
counteract what was wrong in Mrs. Norris by its reverse in 
himself, clearly saw that he had but increased the evil, by 
teaching them to repress their spirits in his presence, so as 
to make their real disposition unknown to him, and sending 
them all for their indulgences to a person who had been 
able to attach them only by the blindness of her affection 
and the excess of her praise. Here had been grievous 
mismanagement ; but, bad as it was, he gradually grew to 
feel that it had not been the most direful mistake in his 
plan of education. Something must have been wanting 
within, or time would have worn away much of its ill effect. 
He feared that principle, active principle, had been wanting ; 
that they had never been properly taught to govern their 
inclinations and tempers by that sense of duty which can 
alone suffice. They had been instructed theoretically in 
their religion, but never required to bring it into daily 
practice. To be distinguished for elegance and accomplish- 
ments — the authorized object of their youth — could have 
had no useful influence that way, no moral effect on the 
mind. He had meant them to be good, but his cares had 
been directed to the understanding and manners, not the 
disposition ; and of the necessity of self-denial and humility 
he feared they had never heard from any lips that could 
profit them. 

Bitterly did he deplore a deficiency which now he could 
scarcely comprehend to have been possible. Wretchedly 



446 Jane Austen 

did he feel that, with all the cost and care of an anxious and 
expensive education, he had brought up his daughters 
without their understanding their first duties, or his being 
acquainted with their character and temper.^ 

This proves that when the opportunity called for 
it, she could be sufficiently serious. Generally, it is 
enough to present the subject with careless ease. 

She had only two daughters, both of whom she had lived 
to see respectably married, and she had now, therefore, 
nothing to do but to marry all the rest of the world. 

We respect Edmund Bertram for awakening to the 
real unworthiness of Mary Crawford through the dis- 
closure of her frivolous view of his sister's fall. This 
is the unanswerable argument for all time to the 
charge of undue levity on the part of Miss Austen. 
"This is what the world does," she makes him say of 
Mary, and the " world " includes parents and relatives. 

XIII 

This brings us to the amusing picture of the 
clergy of her day, as represented in these novels. 
It is safer to be guided by the poetry and fiction 
and general literature of a day, in attempting to 
define its religious side, than by its avowed the- 

^ The reason for her strong disapproval of the Mansfield Park 
theatricals is not only because of the absence of Sir Thomas from 
home, but largely also because of the nature of the play selected, that 
piece being not unlike the 'Love for Love * which put Miss Mirvan 
and Evelina " perpetually out of countenance " at Drury Lane. Had 
something like the ' Duologues,' from Miss Austen's own books, been 
available then, the plot would have taken another course in her 
hands. 



Her Wonderful Charm 447 

ology, this latter being too frequently an intolerant 
revolt from what the day really stood for. The 
Methodist movement had not spent itself in Miss 
Austen's time, and the Evangelical revival was at 
its height. The roughness of the age may be seen 
in the polemics which we now read — if we read 
them at all — with amazement; but it should be 
remembered that not that chiefly, but rather the 
prevailing laxity of faith and the deadness of en- 
thusiasm against which this bluff heartiness of con- 
viction and hatred of opposing views to what was 
considered a saving belief finally threw itself, were 
the leading characteristics of the times, Toplady, 
the choice saint of the English Calvinists, and the 
author of the * Rock of Ages,' attacked Wesley in 
pamphlets entitled ' An Old Fox Tarred and Feath- 
ered,' and wrote, " I much question whether a 
man that dies an Arminian can go to heaven." 
" A low and puny tadpole in divinity " is his sum- 
ing up of the founder of Methodism.^ " A pair 
of horrible liars," he calls him and his co-worker, 
Sellon;^ and Rowland Hill cries out on him as a 
"gray-headed enemy of all righteousness."^ 

But this is merely the result of an earnest religious 
escaping in angry protest from the crass carelessness 

1 ' Works of Augustus M. Toplady/ six vols. London, printed for 
Wm. Baynes & Son, 1S25, vol. v., p. 442. 

2 lb., vol. ii., p. 344. 

3 ' Imposure Detected and the Dead vindicated ; in a Letter to a 
Friend: containing some gentle Strictures on the false and libelous 
Harangue lately delivered by Mr. John Wesley, upon his laying the 
first corner-stone of his new Dissenting Meeting-house, near the City 
Road.' This "Evangelical" preacher, however, repented, in his old 
age, of the harshness of his controversial style ; and in justice to the 
Calvinists it must be said that the Arminians — including their 
English leader — were themselves not altogether guiltless of epithets. 



448 Jane Austen 

and worse of the church of that and the preceding 
epoch. " The pubHc have long remarked with in- 
dignation," says Knox, *' that some of the most dis- 
tinguished coxcombs, drunkards, debauchees, and 
gamesters who figure at the watering places and at all 
public places of resort, are young men of the sacer- 
dotal order." ^ And Arthur Young records hearing 
of this advertisement: " Wanted, a curacy in a good 
sporting country, where the duty is light and the 
neighborhood convivial." ^ The truthfulness of 
Crabbe's picture of the average young parson has 
not been disputed: 

A jovial youth who thinks his Sunday task 
As much as God or man can fairly ask. 



Fiddling and fishing were his arts ; at times 
He altered sermons and he aim'd at rhymes, 
And his fair friends, not yet intent on cards. 
Oft he amused with riddles and charades. 

There can be no doubt that the unfortunate schisms 
in the English Church at this time were in large part 
the result of the worldly indifference of the bishops. 
A little of the " sweet reasonableness " of their pro- 
fessed leader would have urged them to appropriate 
to that which was already " established " whatever was 
convincing in this revival, checking the exuberance 

1 Essay No. 18, in 'Essays Moral and Literary/ by Vicesimus 
Knox, M.A. : a new edition complete in one volume. London : Jones 
& Co., 1827. This has particular weight coming from one of the 
most liberal and urbane clergymen of the period. See his Essay No. 
10, on ' The Respectableness of the Clergy,' in which he argues for 
the dignified ease of the bishops and deans, which has so frequently 
been the object of attack from less conservative writers. 

2 'Travels in France during the Years 1788-8-9.' By Arthur 
Young. London : Geo. Bell & Sons, 1890, p. 327. 



Her Wonderful Charm 449 

while welcoming the enthusiasm. They were too 
comfortable, however, in their political security to 
allow any disturbance of their complacent orthodoxy. 
That wise observer Crabbe, once more, summed up 
the typical clergyman in his Vicar : 

Mild were his doctrines and not one discourse 

But gained in softness what it lost in force. 

If ever fretful thought disturbed his breast, 

If aught of gloom that cheerful mind oppressed, 

It sprang from innovation ; it was then 

He spake of mischief made by restless men. 

Habit with him was all the test of truth : 

It must be right; I 've done it from my youth. 

The extravagances of Methodism were regarded as 
a " spiritual influenza," and a conservative writer like 
Goldsmith finds an excuse for an opposing coldness 
in that " men of real sense and understanding prefer 
a prudent mediocrity to a precarious popularity, 
and fearing to outdo their duty, leave it half done." ^ 
And yet Goldsmith was the friend of the " orthodox " 
Dr. Warner who, describing a dinner with some boon 
companions, writes: "We . . . have just parted in 
a tolerable state of insensibility to the ills of human 
life." 2 And he might have had a more realizing sense 
of how this awakened conscience was endeavoring to 
reform such habits among Christians. Yet it is always 
easy to fall back on a lazy piety — only, we don't call 
it " lazy," but " quiet " — as an excusing substitute for 
the noise of a " popular " religion. We presume that 
the American Christian Endeavorers singing revival 

1 Essay IV. : ' On the English Clergy and Popular Preachers.' 
^ ' George Selwyn and His Contemporaries,' with Memoirs and 

Notes by John Heneage Jesse. London: Richard Bentley, 1844, 

vol. iv., p. 137. 

29 



450 JaJie Austen 

hymns in Westminster Abbey last summer had a 
somewhat similar effect upon the dean and chapter 
of that ancient fane to that produced by the enthu- 
siasm of the early Methodists upon the excellent 
Goldsmith. 

That was the age of formalism, not this, as some 
vainly imagine. And Miss Austen's clergymen are, 
as are all her characters, true types of that age; 
only, in accordance with her determination not to 
draw vice, she purposely chooses inoffensive types. 
It was not in her to be moved, like George Eliot, to 
embody the ideal of a real sanctity in any of her 
clergymen. There were Tryans in her day, but she 
did not come in contact with them, and would not 
have understood them if she had. At a time when 
fashionable society held assemblies on Good Friday 
evening,^ it would require more religious zeal than 
Miss Austen possessed to picture other than the 
ecclesiastical attitude she was familiar with ; which 
was orderly, decent, unharassed by doubt and con- 
victions, full of an Erastian content, classical, cold. 
Religion, as she knew it, was near to her, but it took 
the form of a well-governing morality rather than 
livelier aspects. It was near to her, and therefore 
she did not talk much about it. She was of the age 
of Goldsmith and Johnson in point of religion, and 
would doubtless have laughed sympathetically over 
the doctor's reply to Miss Monkton's declaration that 
she was affected by the pathos of Sterne, " Why, that 
is because, dearest, you are a dunce." 

See how nearly Miss Austen reflects the times. 
Arthur Young's " advertisement" is recalled when we 
read of Charles Hayter's living, in ' Persuasion.' 
1 ' Collections and Recollections,' p. 87. 



Her Wonderful Charm 451 

" And a very good living it was, only five and twenty 
miles from Uppercross, and in a very fine country — fine 
part of Dorsetshire, in the centre of some of the best pre- 
serves in the kingdom, surrounded by three great proprie- 
tors, each more careful and jealous than the other ; and to 
two of the three, at least, Charles Hayter might get a special 
recommendation. Not that he will value it as he ought ; 
Charles is too cool about sporting. That 's the worst of 
him." 



A Church living — mark the vi^ord. It is thought of 
chiefly for its value, as a means of material happi- 
ness, and for offering a parson the opportunity to 
do what he most wants to do — marry. It is natural 
that we think of these charade-writing priests as men 
rather than as clergymen, and so Miss Austen regards 
them ; these Tilneys, who spend most of their time 
at Bath and at their father's manors making them- 
selves agreeable to the ladies, and interrupting such 
pleasant pastimes with an enforced Sunday now and 
then at their rectories ; and these Eltons, who are in 
error only when they fall in love with the wrong girl, 
and not when they pass their mornings reading 
poetry and making conundrums with the right one. 
Mr. Collins avows his determination to " demean 
himself with grateful respect towards " his patroness, 
and " be ever ready to perform those rites and cere- 
monies which are instituted by the Church of Eng- 
land." For " even the clergyman," says Mrs. Clay, 
" even the clergyman, you know, is obliged to go into 
infected rooms, and expose his health and looks to 
all the injury of a poisonous atmosphere." 

Miss Austen belonged to a clerical family, and in 
her brother Henry found an example of those who 



452 J^iic Austen 

took up the Church as a profession rather than as a 
calling. He became a clergyman late in life, after 
failure in other things.^ The sister was, of course, 
appreciative of the humor of the situation. " Uncle 
Henry," she tells a nephew, " writes very superior 
sermons. You and I must try to get hold of one or 
two, and put them in our novels: it would be a fine 
help to a volume; and we could make our heroines 
read it aloud on Sunday evening, just as well as Isa- 
bella Wardour in the ' Antiquary ' is made to read 
the ' History of the Hartz Demon' in the ruins of St. 
Ruth, though I believe, on recollection, Lovell is the 
reader."^ And later, referring to Henry's first ap- 
pearance in a clerical capacity: " It will be a nervous 
hour for our pew." '^ 

It was a day when a clergyman thought it wrong 
to read novels, but had no scruples about playing at 
cards for money, or dancing at public balls ; a day 
when the patron of a living, like Sir Thomas Bertram, 
could sell its presentation to any Dr. Grant who could 
pay the price necessary to cancel his debts, although 
by such an action he is not only bringing into his 
neighborhood an unworthy priest, but is doing an 
injustice to his son, who is destined for that living. 
One can see from these novels what has helped to 
retard the progress of the Anglican communion. 
With this Dr. Grant before her — this Dr. Grant who 
would doubtless have some day become a bishop had 
he not died of apoplexy brought on " by three great 
institutionary dinners in one week" — we have some 
sympathy with Miss Crawford in her attempt to draw 

1 Austen-Leigh, p. 184. Brabourne, vol. i., pp. 94 se^. 

2 Austen-Leigh, p. 309. 

3 /d., p. 314. 



Her Wonderful Charm 453 

Edmund Bertram away from a lazy profession. The 
" worldliness " was not all on her side; an ambitious 
woman naturally desires her husband to have some 
ambitions likewise. 

" It will, indeed, be the forerunner of other interesting 
events ; your sister's marriage, and your taking orders." 

" Yes." 

'• Don't be affronted," said she, laughing ; " but it does 
put me in mind of some of the old heathen heroes, who, 
after performing great exploits in a foreign land, offered 
sacrifices to the gods on their safe return." 

And not one of these clergymen is caricatured, — 
not even Mr. Collins. If we think this worthy is 
drawn too broadly, we have only to remember Mr. 
Clarke with his " august house of Coburg." I sup- 
pose Edmund Bertram is her best clergyman from 
the priestly standpoint, though, as I have said, we 
can think of none of them as clergymen, but only as 
men. Personally, I like Tilney the best because of 
his defiance of his father in coming to Catherine : 
he may have been a poor priest, but he was a man 
and a gentleman. And saving Collins, none of them 
were hypocrites ; they were all too frankly secular for 
that. 

XIV 

This elegance never allows her to parade her feel- 
ings. In all probability, she never suffered from a 
love affair. A mysterious stranger whom she is said 
to have met in South Devon figures in some of the 
romances written about her, but her nephew denies 
any real knowledge of the episode.^ If she loved 

1 Austen-Leigh, p. 199. 



454 ]^^^ Austen 

she hid it under a smiling mask, and there is no evi- 
dence whatever of such an attachment in her letters. 
She was herself an " elegant female," loving the 
niceties of a polite life, and it would have been a 
transcending love which could have induced her to 
welcome poverty for its sake. Apart from her match- 
making proclivities, she was more like her own Emma 
than any one else ; and no Knightley crossed her 
path. 

" I do so wonder, Miss Woodhouse, that you should not 
be married, or going to be married — so charming as you 
are." 

Emma laughed and replied, — 

" My being charming, Harriet, is not quite enough to in- 
duce me to marry; I must find other people charming — 
one other person, at least. And I am not only not going 
to be married at present, but have very little intention of 
ever marrying at all." 

" Ah, so you say ; but I cannot believe it." 

" I must see somebody very superior to any one I have 
seen yet, to be tempted : Mr. Elton, you know (recollecting 
herself), is out of the question; and I do «^/ wish to see 
any such person. I would rather not be tempted. If I 
were to marry, I must expect to repent it." 

" Dear me ! — it is so odd to hear a woman talk so ! " 

" I have none of the usual inducements of women to 
marry. Were I to fall in love, indeed, it would be a dif- 
ferent thing ; but I never have been in love ; it is not my 
way or my nature ; and I do not think I ever shall. And 
without love, I am sure I should be a fool to change such 
a situation as mine. Fortune I do not want ; employment 
I do not want ; consequence I do not want ; I believe few 
married women are half as much mistress of their husband's 
house as I am of Hartfield ; and never, never could I 



Her Wonderful Charm 455 

expect to be so truly beloved and important, so always 
first and always right in any man's eyes as I am in my 
father's." 



" Never mind, Harriet, I shall not be a poor old maid ; 
and it is poverty only which makes celibacy contemptible 
to a generous public ! A single woman with a very narrow 
income must be a ridiculous disagreeable old maid ! the 
proper sport of boys and girls ; but a single woman of good 
fortune is always respectable, and may be as sensible and 
pleasant as anybody else ! And the distinction is not quite 
so much against the candor and common-sense of the world 
as appears at first, for a very narrow income has a tendency 
to contract the mind, and sour the temper. Those who 
can barely live, and who live perforce in a very small, and 
generally, very inferior society, may well be illiberal and 
cross. ... If I know myself, Harriet, mine is an active, busy 
mind, with a great many independent resources ; and I do 
not perceive why I should be more in want of employment 
at forty or fifty than at one-and-twenty. Woman's usual 
occupations of eye, and hand, and mind will be as open to 
me then as they are now, or with no important variation. 
If I draw less, I shall read more ; if I give up music, I shall 
take to carpetvvork. And as for objects of interest, objects 
for the affections, which is, in truth, the great point of infe- 
riority, the want of which is really the great evil to be 
avoided in nof marrying, I shall be very well off, with all the 
children of a sister I love so much to care about. There 
will be enough of them, in all probability, to supply every 
sort of sensation that declining life can need. There will 
be enough for every hope and every fear ; and though my 
attachment to none can equal that of a parent, it suits my 
ideas of comfort better than what is warmer and blinder. 
My nephews and nieces, — I shall often have a niece with 
me." 



456 J^iiG Austen 

She kept her own counsel about the things nearest 
her heart, if anything was nearer to it than the afifec- 
tion of her sister. And while one might not be led to 
expect much valuable advice on the subject of matri- 
mony from one who refers to the fact of the mistress 
of Lord Craven living with him at Ashdown Park as 
" the only unpleasant circumstance about him," — not 
sufficiently unpleasant, however, to prevent her sister- 
in-law from meeting him and finding " his manners 
very pleasing indeed,"^ — still, the letter she writes 
her niece on such a subject is all that the most 
anxious mother could desire, notwithstanding its 
amusing admixture of the "worldly" view. She 
refers to the rarity of such a combination of virtues 
as reside in the young man in question : 

" There are such beings in the world, perhaps one in a 
thousand, as the creature you and I should think perfection, 
whose grace and spirit are united to worth, where the man- 
ners are equal to the heart and understanding; but such 
a person may not come in your way, or, if he does, he may 
not be the eldest son of a man of fortune, the near relation 
of your particular friend, and belonging to your own 
country." ^ 

Prudent Jane ! But then she concludes by urging the 
niece not to marry unless there is real affection. 
Good Jane ! 

It was reserved for the great glory of Charlotte 
Bronte to paint the full picture oi Xho. passion of love 
from the woman's standpoint. Jane Austen presents 
the sentiment merely. It was still a day when a 

1 Brabourne, vol. L, p. 257. Compare this with a similar situa- 
tion in ' Mansfield Park.' 
2 lb., vol. ii., p. 281. 



Her Wonderful Charm 457 

woman's love was regarded as the natural return of 
gratitude for the man's. One would not say that it 
was impossible to portray the later view in Miss 
Austen's day, and yet the age was against it. Except 
in * Persuasion,' we are charmed, not moved, by her 
love scenes. Still, she rose superior to the romantic 
ideals of her day. Henry Tilney's love had its source 
in a pity for Catherine's love for him. " It is a new 
circumstance in romance, I acknowledge, dreadfully 
derogatory to a heroine's dignity; but if it be as new 
in common life, the credit of a wild imagination will 
at least be all my own." Jane Austen is right here, 
as always. Catherine did not fling herself at Henry, 
as Miss Bingley did at Darcy, for she would not have 
been Miss Austen's heroine thus : it is the difference 
between sweet frankness and vulgar ambition. Love 
must spring from something; why not from that 
which is confessedly akin to it? 

Her heroes and her heroines always marry, and 
there is a general rightness in all the sentiment. 
When the first love is worthy, it is rewarded, and 
when not, not. When she sets out to draw a full- 
length portrait of a lover, she makes a success of it. 
What could be more hopeless than Darcy's unpardon- 
able rudeness to Elizabeth at the dance? But we are 
forced to acknowledge, step by step, with his repent- 
ance, that pride of race must make liberal demands 
on Love before it can swallow Mrs. Bennet as a 
mother-in-law; and in the completeness of this won- 
derful woman's art, this love finally becomes supreme, 
— the " pride" of a Darcy checked and humbled by 
the worth of a Bennet, and the " prejudice" of a girl 
transformed into affection for a character which the 
" pride " merely cloaked and could not hide. The 



458 Jai^e Austen 

" pride " was not a bar, it was a gate, to love, and 
opened to it. And true love is the humor of it all. 

She does not dwell on the unhappiness of ill-mated 
marriages, although opportunities offer. Mr. and 
Mrs. Bennet, Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram, are 
certainly in this class. The conservative, pleasant 
view is taken that these things did not matter much, 
so long as the material comfort of a home was pro- 
vided. This is evidently true of Mr. and Mrs. CoUins. 
But in each of these cases Miss Austen makes it very 
plain that the wife is not capable of unhappiness, 
and is therefore an object of intellectual contempt 
rather than a subject for sympathetic pity. Such 
marriages are part of the comic scheme. She would 
probably have said, if questioned closely, that one's 
happiness does not depend entirely on any one 
person, notwithstanding the romantic notion to the 
contrary. The idea of the " predestination of love " 
was not predominant then, though we see it hinted 
at. She looks out on the waves and sees them 
troubled, but believes they will break peacefully 
upon the shore at last ; and it is not their breaking on 
the shore which affects her. Her cheerful view takes 
the happiness of her well-mated couples as a matter- 
of-course not demanding any analysis. Mr. and Mrs. 
John Knightley, Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner, Admiral and 
Mrs. Croft, Mr. and Mrs. Weston are perfectly happy, 
and even Mr. John Dashwood has a wife eminently 
suited to his standards of bliss. 

But in 'Persuasion' we strike a deeper note. It is 
the loveliest of her stories. She felt the approach of 
death as she wrote it, and she was moved to throw 
aside her reticence. There, if nowhere else, she 
utters the true woman's appeal: 



Her Wonderful Charm 459 

We certainly do not forget you so soon as you forget us. 
It is perhaps our fate rather than our merit. We cannot 
help ourselves. We live at home, quiet, confined, and our 
feelings prey upon us. You are forced on exertion. You 
have always a profession, pursuits, business of some sort or 
other, to take you back into the world immediately, and 
continual occupation and change soon weaken impressions. 

The male auditor arguing that this does not apply 
to the case in point, Anne says that if the change be 
not from outward circumstances, it must be from 
within ; " it must be nature, man's nature, which 
has done the business for Captain Benwick." Cap- 
tain Harville will not allow this either, believing 
the reverse, and discovers a true analogy between the 
bodily and mental frame : " As our bodies are the 
strongest, so are our feelings." Anne grants that 
they may be, " but by the same spirit of analogy. 
. . ours are the most tender," and shows that 
while man is more robust than woman he is not 
longer lived, which explains her point of view of the 
nature of their attachments. If woman's feelings were 
to be added to the difficulties, privations, and dangers 
of a man's life, *' it would be too hard, indeed." Har- 
ville then quotes the songs and proverbs against her, 
which leads Miss Elliot to retort that. the men have 
the advantage over her sex in being permitted to tell 
their own story. "I believe you capable," she con- 
cludes, 

of everything great and good in your married lives. I be- 
lieve you equal to every important exertion, and to every 
domestic forbearance so long as — if I may be allowed the 
expression — so long as you have an object. I mean while 
the woman you love lives and lives for you. AH the privi- 



460 Jane Austen 

lege I claim for my own sex (it is not a very enviable one, 
— you need not covet it) is that of loving longest when ex- 
istence or when hope is gone. 

Yet Miss Austen is a just woman, for she makes 
Frederick, who has been overhearing this, immedi- 
ately write to Anne, even as she is speaking, declar- 
ing to her that his own long years of waiting prove 
one exception to her rule, and the one exception in 
all the world she is most anxious to acknowledge. 

Originally, it will be remembered, this scene was 
differently arranged, and the chapter containing this 
most beautiful defence of woman's love is a substitute 
for the first draught. This is more than an indication 
of the great care she gave to all her compositions ; it 
was an inspiration at the gate of the tomb. 



XV 

Her heroines are joys forever. Each has her dis- 
tinctive excellence, each makes her individual appeal. 
One cannot separate them into groups, although 
there are teasing points of similarity, — another in- 
dication of her equal mastery of particular and 
general. 

The girl Jane Austen reveals in her letters possi- 
bilities of romantic inclination which her critical 
faculties held in reserve. Her Emma corrects her 
Catherine. Her earlier heroine is the personification 
of simple-mindedness. She is simple, but not silly. 
A more complex nature would have resented the 
superior wit of Tilney at the expense of her ignorance, 
and would have retorted in kind. But Catherine is 
clear-sighted enough to see that there is nothing ill- 



Her Wonderful Charm 461 

tempered in his persiflage, and is humble enough to 
know that she is ignorant; so she accepts the first in 
the spirit in which it is offered, and sets about to 
remedy the second. With all her romanticism, she 
is the reverse of a fool. She sees through the designs 
of Isabelle Thorpe and refuses to be taken in by them. 
Thackeray's women are not so wise. 

Like Catherine, Fanny Price, notwithstanding her 
gentle, yielding nature, can be firm on occasion. She 
is faithful at once to the dictates of heart and head^ 
which is not such a common virtue. Sir Thomas 
recognizes this strength and fears it, and Miss Austen 
cunningly aims a shaft at " perfidious man " in noting 
the fact: 

He could not help fearing that if such very long allowances 
of time and habit were necessary for her, she might not 
have persuaded herself into receiving his addresses properly, 
before the young man's inclinations for paying them were 
over. 

She represents the clinging-vine ideal perhaps 
more than the other heroines, but it clings in the 
way every true-hearted man would desire. She is 
sweet, yet strong ; as delicate as a flower under the 
snow, but as steady as truth itself. She should have 
been named Violet. 

And Anne Elliot is Viola! There we have the 
true " sensibihty," as we also have it in EHnor Dash- 
wood, — the sensibihty suffering in silence, governed 
by the " sense " which is too proud and too gentle to 
give it voice. " She pined in thought," even while 
"smiling at grief;" and every reader exclaims, 
"Was not this love, indeed?" With Emma the 



462 ]^^^ Austen 

ladyhood is at times predominant over the woman- 
hood: the pensive burden of Anne ElHot's thought 
is a note of sad womanhood, into which is steeped 
the brilliant lady quality Miss Austen gives to all her 
heroines. Elizabeth Bennet's voice laughs silvery 
down the ages ; Anne Elliot's rings a mellow golden 
cadence. She is inwardly pensive, not outwardly 
melancholy. Her love lays a care upon her, but it 
makes her hide it that she may care for others the 
more. And with what deft art is contrasted her real 
melancholy with the sentimentality, her shrinking 
" sense " with the unshrinking " sensibility," of Captain 
Benwick ! 



For though shy, he did not seem reserved ; it had 
rather the appearance of feelings glad to burst their usual 
restraints ; and having talked of poetry, the richness of the 
present age, and gone through a brief comparison of opin- 
ions as to the first-rate poets, trying to ascertain whether 
* Marmion ' or * The Lady of the Lake ' were to be preferred, 
and how ranked the ' Giaour ' and * The Bride of Abydos,' 
and moreover, how the * Giaour ' was to be pronounced, he 
showed himself so intimately acquainted with all the ten- 
derest songs of the one poet, and the impassioned descrip- 
tions of hopeless agony of the other ; he repeated with such 
tremulous feeling the various lines which imaged a broken 
heart or a mind destroyed by wretchedness, and looked so 
entirely as if he meant to be understood, that she ventured 
to hope he did not always read only poetry ; and to say 
that she thought it was the misfortune of poetry to be seldom 
safely enjoyed by those who enjoyed it completely ; and 
that the strong feelings which alone could estimate it truly 
were the very feelings which ought to taste it but 
sparingly. 



Her Wonderful Charm 463 

The woman who does not love Anne Elliot is not 
a good woman.^ 

We see that the gentleness of a girl like this does 
not stand in the way of her wisdom. The heroines 
of Jane Austen are clear-sighted like herself; they 
not only choose the best ends, but also the best 
means for accomplishing them. They are witty, but 
refined; satirical rather than sarcastic; never biting; 
not keen in the pursuit of prey ; not cultivating a high 
pitch, but manifesting a high cultivation in a natural 
pitch. There is about none of her women the sharp 
strain we detect in the characterizations of certain 
"lady novelists " whom we could name; nothing — 
unless we happen to be fools ourselves — to cause us 
uneasiness in their society. Emma is the only occa- 
sional exception, and that interesting young woman 
is made to suffer for the excess.^ 



1 In the famous article of Archbishop Whately already referred to 
more than once, the assertion is made that the situation in 'Persua- 
sion ' is so true that it must have been the result of a personal experi- 
ence. But since the Archbishop's day, more particularly than before 
it, has the artist been allowed to stand apart from the man ; and if 
Miss Moira O'Neill, who perhaps may be called the chief of living 
Irish singers, can, in ' Denny's Daughter,' feel instinctively a man's 
pain at a woman's refusal, cannot Miss Austen be permitted this 
artist's freedom, much more easily imagined in her case because 
applied to her own sex ? 

2 The only error we can charge against Miss Austen's art in this 
field lies in this character. It has always struck me as a queer mis- 
take to have allowed Emma to devise an attachment between Harriet 
Smith and a young man of such aristocratic connections as Frank 
Churchill. The marriage with Elton would have been well enough; 
but fancy the dismay at Enscombe over the announcement of an 
engagement between those two ! There ought to have been another 
man in the story to have given Emma's second mistake freer scope. 
Miss Austen might have retorted, if charged with the "slip," that a 
zeal for matchmaking makes even the wisest fools, and that this very 
absurdity was purposely selected to emphasize the fact. Still, a 



464 ]^^^ Austen 

We have said that Emma is more like her creator 
than the other characters : she reflects the " vvorldli- 
ness " more than the rest. Yet there is the redeeming 
human quahty in both. " Poor Mrs. Stent ! " writes 
Miss Austen to her sister. " It has been her lot to 
be always in the way ; but we must be merciful, for 
perhaps in time we may come to be Mrs. Stents 
ourselves, unequal to anything, and unwelcome to 
everybody." ^ Here we see Miss Bates m posse, and 
the " impatient note " of a bright spirit bored at dul- 
ness; but with all Emma's mimicry. Miss Austen 
subdues it to a kind level, punishing her heroine 
in the one instance where it offends the poor lady by 
visiting it with Mr. Knightley's rebuke. Our author 
was notably independent, considering her age, in the 
expression of her views, and she is never restrained by 
any false standard of " female modesty." Referring 
to a certain music master, she writes : " I have not 
Fanny's fondness for masters, and Mr. M. does not 
give me any longing after them. The truth is, I 
think that they are all, at least music-masters, made 
of too much consequence, and allowed to take too 
many liberties with their scholars' time." ^ Yet nothing 
could have been more shocking to Miss Austen than 
the kind of independence advocated for women in 
these latter days. She had the old-fashioned belief, 
which is still shared by the majority of her sisters, 
that no matter how superior the woman is to the 
man in many things, the fit relationship of the sexes 
lies in the recognition of man's general superiority in 

young woman of Emma's elegant perceptions, one would say, would 
hardly be led astray in this fashion. 

1 Austen-Leigh, p. 245. 

2 Brabourne, vol. ii., p. 259. 



Her Wonderful Charm 465 

judgment and strength, which makes him the viaster, 
although, of course, in the spirit of Christian courtesy 
and forbearance. So her wittiest and most indepen- 
dent heroine is made "inferior" to the hero, and 
Emma sweetly and cheerfully acknowledges the jus- 
tice of Knightley's rebukes. She is not a snob, 
because she is too intrinsically genteel to ape gentility ; 
but her faults lie towards superciliousness, which is 
corrected in the most natural way by her real good- 
nature and by the love with which she reads her 
mentor's mind. She is the most distinguished of 
Miss Austen's young ladies. While in point of 
years she is not much older than Elizabeth Bennet, 
she reflects her creator's more mature thought. And 
in the last analysis there is something very human 
about her. 

Half-way between Anne Elliot and Emma stands 
Elinor Dashwood, and this position indicates the 
variety which Miss Austen gives to her characters. 
Macaulay delighted to point out the differences be- 
tween her clergymen, notwithstanding their points of 
similarity; this is much more noticeable in her hero- 
ines. Elinor, like Anne, suffers from an unhappily 
retarded success in love. She carries herself with 
the same dignity, and hides her grief with an equal 
unselfishness. But there is a more sharply defined 
aplomb about her. The circumstances of her case 
make it necessary for her to show her hand more 
frequently, and she does it with the fine flavor of wit; 
at times we forget the pathos of the situation in the 
gallantry with which it is maintained. 

But what shall we say of Elizabeth Bennet ? She is, 
all in all, one of the most satisfactory heroines in fic- 
tion, — one of the first half-dozen we would pick out 

30 



466 Jane Austen 

above all the rest as the most charming. We admire 
Emma in spite of her faults ; we love Elizabeth without 
thinking of faults at all. We could see, if we wanted 
to, the lurking possibilities of faults in her character, 
but they do not come to the surface ; and to so 
fashion a personality is very rare art. She is not 
perhaps without actual imperfections, but the imper- 
fections are not actionable, and she is not " faultless" 
like Thackeray's women. We admire Emma too much 
to love her; our admiration for Elizabeth is lost in 
our love. The "sweet careless music" of Walter 
Scott gives no strain like the melody which the bare 
mention of Elizabeth Bennet's name awakens in the 
memory. It was characteristic of that master's fine 
chivalry to make even Di Vernon, his queen of women, 
a little too perfect for our limited minds to grasp. 
We apprehend that sort of a heroine ; we comprehend 
Elizabeth Bennet. She was Miss Austen's own favor- 
ite, by which token she should be ours also. With 
characteristic playful fondness, she pretended to search 
for her characters in real life. She mentions in one of 
her letters seeing a portrait of Mrs. Bingley at the 
exhibition in Spring Gardens, " but there was no Mrs. 
Darcy. [There was no chance of that in an)'- collec- 
tion of Sir Joshuas.] Mrs. Bingley is exactly her- 
self, — size, shaped face, features, and sweetness. 
She is dressed in a white gown, with green ornaments, 
which convinces me of what I had always supposed, 
that green was a favorite color with her. I dare say 
Mrs. Darcy will be in yellow."^ After a visit to other 
galleries, she confesses her disappointment at not 
finding anything like Mrs. Darcy there. " I can only 
imagine that Mr. Darcy prizes any picture of her too 
1 Brabourne, vol. ii., pp. 139, 140. 



Her Wonderful Charm 467 

much to like to see it exposed to the public eye. I can 
imagine he would have that sort of feeling, that mix- 
ture of love and pride and delicacy."^ 

Even that belittler of woman's art, Mr. Saintsbury, 
says in his Preface to ' Pride and Prejudice ' : 

In the novels of the last one hundred years, there are 
vast numbers of young ladies with whom it might be a 
pleasure to fall in love ; there are at least five with whom, 
as it seems to me, no man of taste and spirit can help doing 
so. Their names are, in chronological order, Elizabeth 
Bennet, Diana Vernon, Argemone Lavington, Beatrix Es- 
mond, and Barbara Grant. 

And while confessing that he should have been most 
in love with Beatrix and Argemone, none of the 
others, he maintains, could come into competition with 
Elizabeth as a wife for daily companionship. As for 
me, when I first read these novels, I wanted to marry 
each of the heroines as she was presented, — except 
Emma, of whom I am still a little afraid ; I should 
feel nervous about asking my bachelor friends home 
to dinner, for fear that she would want to marry 
them off to Harriet Smith. 

Even the subordinate women of her stories are dis- 
tinguished. It is a mistake to rank Marianne Dash- 
wood with the hopelessly silly group consisting of 
Isabelle Thorpe and the Steeles. Her type is differ- 
ent from all the others. She is not selfishly vain, and 
is not spoiled by the world. She has no trace of the 
vulgarity of the worst of her class, and she is so truth- 
ful that she cannot even fib in " society," or appear to 
be other than she is. Eleanor Tilney is what the 
playwrights would call the second leading lady of the 
1 Brabourne, vol. ii., p. 143. 



468 Jane Austen 

book ; yet of her the Earl of Iddesleigh can write : 
" Surely the whole House of Lords envied the un- 
named viscount who became her husband."^ 



XVI 

It is difficult to speak with critical nicety as to the 
comparative merits of such novels as these; for as 
with persons, so with fiction, one may have a per- 
sonal favorite, although aware of the superiority of 
another. In the matter of plot there is not much 
choice. Whatever surprises she has in store for us 
are kept well in hand. No one can foresee how 
Edward Ferrars is to be released from Lucy Steele. 
Half-way through ' Persuasion ' we are uncertain 
whether Elliot, Benwick, or Wentworth is to marry 
Anne, and we are well on in * Emma' before we can 
decide as to whether Mrs. Weston's surmise is cor- 
rect that Knightley is in love with Jane Fairfax, or 
whether Churchill is not himself, or again, whether 
Knightley is in love with Emma. Yet the plots are 
not sensationally developed. The earlier pages nat- 
urally lead up to the swiftness of interest in the con- 
cluding chapters; and as with all true realists, the 
character-drawing and the charm of narration occupy 
us more than the mere story. I would say that 
'Pride and Prejudice' is the most brilliant of the 
fictions, ' Emma' the most elegant, ' Mansfield Park' 
the most carefully detailed, ' Persuasion ' the most 
beautiful. But it is foolish to dwell on a comparison 
where all are brilliant, all elegant, all worked out 
most carefully, and all beautiful. We notice, indeed, 

1 Nineteenth Century, May, 1900. 



Her Wonderful Charm 469 

a maturity in the later novels which gives them a 
more chiselled grace ; Lady Bertram is done with 
less exuberance than Mrs, Bennet; and although Miss 
Austen let herself go on Miss Bates — 

" How would he bear to have Miss Bates belonging to 
him ? To have her haunting the Abbey, and thanking him 
all day long for his great kindness in marrying Jane ? ' So 
very kind and obliging ! But he always had been such a 
very kind neighbor ! ' And then fly off, through half a sen- 
tence, to her mother's old petticoat, * Not that it was such 
a very old petticoat either, — for still it would last a great 
while, — and indeed, she must thankfully say that their 
petticoats were all very strong ' " — 

yet she suffers herself to be rebuked for her wit 
when it becomes unkind. " The hand which drew 
Miss Bates," says Mr, Goldwin Smith, "though it 
could not have drawn Lady Macbeth, could have 
drawn Dame Quickly and the Nurse in ' Romeo and 
Juliet.'"! 

But restraint was always evident in Miss Austen's 
work, and good taste always controlled it. We see it 
in her avoidance of the highfalutin' names of the 
popular heroines of her day. Instead of Honoria we 
have Elinor; instead of Indiana, Fanny; instead of 
Eugenia, Catherine ; instead of Camilla, Elizabeth ; 
instead of Evelina, Anne. We see it in the faithful 
realism which did not permit her to extend her fancy 
beyond the limits of her experience. It has been 
pointed out that she has drawn no scene in which 
men alone are the actors; she could not have imag- 
ined the Rainbow Tavern chapter in * Silas Marner,' 

1 ' Life of Jane Austen,' by Goldwin Smith. London : Walter 
Scott, 1S90, p. 139. 



470 J^i^s Austen 

— an evidence that she is not Shaksperean in 
the sense that George Eliot is. Her men are not 
done with so sure a hand as her women. An in- 
dication of Richardson's effeminacy is that Clarissa 
is truer to Hfe than Lovelace : the same superiority 
with Miss Austen simply proves her femininity. 
Just what view she would have taken of the present 
standards of the higher education of women, it is 
impossible to say ; her conservative instincts led her 
to cover any ambitions of her time in that direction 
with ridicule : 

Mrs. Goddard was the mistress of a school, — not of a 
seminary, or an establishment, or anything which professed, 
in long sentences of refined nonsense, to combine liberal 
acquirements with elegant morality, upon new principles 
and new systems, — and where young ladies for enormous 
pay might be screwed out of health and into vanity, — but 
a real, honest, old-fashioned boarding-school, where a 
reasonable quantity of accomplishments were sold at a rea- 
sonable price, and where girls might be sent to be out of 
the way, and scramble themselves into a little education 
without any danger of coming back prodigies. 

She did her best, by the use of a genuine drama, 
to remove theatricality from English fiction. She sub- 
stituted art for artifice. She pleads not guilty to the 
favorite fatuity of creating an improbability and then 
taking refuge in piety by calling the escape " provi- 
dential ; " reminding one of the Sunday-school teacher's 
answer to the question why the people mentioned in 
the Bible as walking on the roofs of houses did not 
fall off, — " Because all things are possible with God." 
She was not a learned woman, and, as we have seen, 
humorously confessed her profound ignorance of phi- 



Her Wonderful Charm 471 

losophy. She was well acquainted with many forms 
of " polite literature," however. It was an age when, 
as Gibbon complained, there were no public libraries 
suitable for a scholar's use, although the circulating 
library was flourishing like the green bay tree. She 
amusingly criticises Egerton's ' Fitz-Albini,' and 
refers to Boswell's ' Tour to the Hebrides ' and his 
* Johnson ; ' " and, as some money will yet remain in 
Burdon's hands, it is to be laid out in the purchase 
of Cowper's works. This would please Mr. Clarke, 
could he know it." ^ She is quite determined not to 
be pleased with Mrs. West's * Alicia DeLacy,' and 
thinks she can be stout against anything written by 
that lady.^ Of Miss S. S. Burney's ' Alphonsine,' she 
says: "'Alphonsine' will not do. We were disgusted 
in twenty pages, as, independent of a bad translation, 
it has indelicacies which disgrace a pen hitherto so 
pure ; and we changed it for the ' Female Quixote,' 
which now makes our evening amusement; to me a 
very high one, as I find the work quite equal to 
what I remembered it." ^ She is not much pleased 
with ' Marmion,' which she reads aloud, evenings.* 
Espriella's ' Letters ' are " horribly anti-English." ^ 
In regard to Mrs. Hawkins she comments, " As to 
love, her heroines have very comical feelings." ^ 
Miss Owenson's ' Ida of Athens ' she acknowledges 
must be very clever, " because it was written, as the 

1 Brabourne, vol. i., pp. 169, 170. 

2 lb., vol. ii., p. 318. 

8 lb., vol. i.,p. 316. She approves of Mrs. Lenox probably because 
of points of similarity between the ' Quixote' and the attitude of her- 
self in ' Northanger Abbey.' 

4 lb., vol. i., p. 356. 

6 lb., vol. ii., p. 8. 

® Austen-Leigh, p. 286. 



472 ]^^^ Austen 

authoress says, in three months ... If the warmth 
of her language could affect the body it might be 
worth reading in this weather." ^ She is " very fond 
of Sherlock's sermons," preferring them " to almost 
any." 2 She speaks of Goldsmith, Hume, and Robert- 
son as her old guides in history, and to Miss Lloyd 
she writes: " I am reading ' Henry's History of Eng- 
land,' which I will repeat to you in any manner you 
may prefer, — either in a loose, desultory, uncon- 
nected stream, or dividing my recital as the historian 
divides it himself, into seven parts ... so that for 
every evening in the week there will be a different 
subject."^ There are references to most of the living 
poets in either the letters or the novels ; and occa- 
sionally we are surprised by her quoting some more 
recondite author, as Mary Crawford's citation of Isaak 
Hawkins Browne. 

She knew enough to be a good critic, her exquisite 
taste and her never-failing humor always standing her 
in good stead. How cheerful her laugh at her niece's 
manuscript ! 

" His having been in love with the aunt gives Cecilia an 
additional interest in him. I like the idea — a very proper 
compliment to an aunt ! I rather imagine, indeed, that 
nieces are seldom chosen but out of compliment to some 
aunt or another. I daresay Ben was in love with me once, 
and would never have thought of you if he had not supposed 
me dead of scarlet fever." ^ 

" Devereux Forester's being ruined by his vanity," 
she writes this same young relative, concerning an- 

1 Brabourne, vol. ii., p. 62. 2 /^. 

8 Austen-Leigh, p. 235. 

* Brabourne, vol. ii., p. 323. 



Her Wonderful Charm 473 

other of her characters, " is extremely good, but I 
wish you would not let him plunge into a * vortex of 
dissipation.' I do not object to the thing, but I cannot 
bear the expression; it is such thorough novel slang, 
and so old that I dare say Adam met with it in the 
first novel he opened." ^ She guessed that 'Waverley ' 
was written by Scott before the secret was out: 
"Walter Scott has no business to write novels, espe- 
cially good ones. It is not fair. He has fame and 
profit enough as a poet, and ought not to be 
taking the bread out of other people's mouths."^ So 
when a woman like Jane Austen deliberately cancels 
a 'Lady Susan,' and relegates a family of 'Watsons' 
to obscurity, we confess to feeling more curiosity 
about it than interest in it ; for we have enough faith 
in the critical faculty of one who can, in the crucial 
pain of her last hours, cancel a chapter for the pur- 
pose of substituting a better one, to abide by that 
faculty in leaving cancelled, in the time of her health, 
two entire novels. 

But this elegance of restraint is finest when it 
smilingly rebukes an unnecessary desire for details 
which she considered indelicate to enumerate. When 
Knightley proposes, "What did she say?" asks 
Miss Austen of Emma, knowing that that is just 
what her sentimental audience wishes to learn. "Just 
what she ought, of course. A lady always does." 
She knows that the genuine lovers of Elizabeth 



^ Brabourne, vol. ii., p, 317. 

2 Austen-Leigh, p. 257. This letter is quoted more fully by Lord 
Brabourne, who gives the date of it, Sept. 28, 1814, about two months 
after the publication of the novel. This may, of course, merely indi- 
cate, that the authorship was more generally known than has been 
supposed. 



474 Jane Austen 

Bennet are absolute on the unalloyed sincerity of 
that young lady's regard for Darcy, — that this re- 
gard is not in the slightest degree increased by the 
prospective delights of Pemberley. She also knows, 
however, that many readers will suspect such an ex- 
planation for the esteem ; so, in answer to her sister's 
inquiries as to how long she had loved Mr. Darcy, 
Elizabeth is made to reply: "I believe I must date it 
from my first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pember-" 
ley." Perhaps very young readers do not much 
admire Miss Austen. 



XVII 

The appreciation of Miss Austen has come to be 
one of the marks of literary taste. She is appreci- 
ated even where the preference is for other styles of 
workmanship. More and more is our age less easily 
amused, requiring greater intricacy and subtler tangles 
than before, just as a latter-day audience demands more 
and more hazardous performances on the trapeze to 
gratify its pampered taste for daring skill, which would 
not put up with the simpler exploits which amazed 
our fathers. Notwithstanding this, the simplicity of 
Miss Austen's art satisfies the jaded sense, — satisfies 
it, indeed, because it is jaded with these new wines 
with which it has been experimenting, and glad to 
taste again the grateful product of a sounder vintage. 
" I find myself every now and then," says fine old 
Walter Scott, " with one of her novels in my hands." 
For the Homeric quality of laughter inextinguishable 
is hers : we can never think of her without thinking 
of Mr. Collins, who had the kind intention of chris- 



Her Wonderful Charm 475 

tening, marrying, and burying his parishioners when- 
ever it did not conflict with his duties to Lady 
Catherine de Bourgh ; and of Mr, Woodhouse lov- 
ing to see the cloth laid, but convinced that every- 
thing on it was unwholesome; and of Mrs. Norris 
going home " with all the supernumerary jellies." 

It is almost impossible to overestimate her impor- 
tance. Her star rose at the close of a dull night in a 
gray morning presaging a clear day. The haunting 
delicacy of her idea is of the virginal beauty of dawn. 
Out of its sloth and degradation, fiction, at her bid- 
ding, put on new life, — 

. . . youth irrepressibly fair 
wakes like a wondering rose. 

Her skill was all-complete, the bright elegance of 
her charm all-perfect. She is the Meissonier of liter- 
ary art, and the fair mistress of its subtlest intricacies. 
And her life, moving along the high level tracks of 
serene good sense, and glittering with the distinction 
of wit, was in finest accord with the best creations of 
her fancy. " I can indeed bear witness," says her 
nephew, " that there was scarcely a charm in her 
most delightful characters that was not a true reflec- 
tion of her own sweet temper and loving heart." 

She was buried in the grand minster under whose 
gracious shade she came to rest in the sweet eventide 
which fell so swiftly on her noon. She lies almost 
opposite the tomb of William of Wykeham, and round 
about her is the crumbling dust of mighty saints and 
great witnesses for truth. And not unworthily sleeps 
she there among the sculptured dead. 



JUL 9 1903 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 




013 975 525 A 



